Eating Animals — this vegan life

Secondly, the utterly shocking bit about the fishing industry. Jesus H Christ, fishing is insanely out of control. In my ignorance I imagined fish were still caught one by one, or at least in nets that weren’t 30 miles long. Yes, you read that right. THIRTY MILES LONG.

He describes the way we’ve entered the oceans to pillage its depth as a war. We have raged war on the oceans. I quote: ‘Once the picture of industrial fishing is filled in – the 1.4billion hooks deployed annually on long lines, the 1,200 nets, each one thirty miles in length, used by only one fleet to catch only one species, the ability of a single vessel to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes – it becomes easier to think of contemporary fishers as factory farmers rather than fishermen.’

If only those insane, 30 mile long nets did only catch one species. But of course they bloody don’t because humans are dicks. It’s called bycatch. Shrimp account for 2% of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33% of global bycatch – other sea life is thrown overboard, dead or dying.

Then there’s the 145 other species regularly killed while fishers catch tuna. Safran Foer lists a long handful, but we’re talking manta ray, numerous types of sharks, mackerel, marlin, swordfish, a ton of fish I’ve never even heard of, turtles, gulls, albatross, whales and dolphins. It is INSANE that this is legal.

One can only hope that the astonishing beauty revealed in David Attenborough documentaries like One Planet can somehow wake the world from this walking sleep.