Last month during an informational hearing, the Senate in Oregon was presented with a legislative proposal to protect farmed fish in the state. Animal Equality’s Legal Advocacy Counsel, Sarah Hanneken, co-presented the initiative that would create minimum welfare standards for fish as the state plans to see an expansion of aquaculture—”factory farming in water.”
How would this legislation protect fish?
The proposed Oregon Aquaculture Act would establish minimal but essential protections for farmed fish:
- Establish more humane slaughtering processes, including stunning prior to slaughter. Current inhumane killing processes include simply taking fish out of the water and allowing them to suffocate on ice, which prolongs the asphyxiation process.
- Set standards to protect native species, ecosystems, and Oregon’s waters by prohibiting fish farming in marine waters, for example. Oregon would join its neighboring states, California and Washington, in banning open net pens that allow waste, parasites and other harmful chemicals from
Animal Intervention was a show on the National Geographic channel that opportunistically added to anti-exotic pet hysteria. Here is a graphic from the community’s web site that lists the numbers of individual giant exotic pet-inflicted injuries and fatalities. Of course, the ‘unique’ animals get lumped collectively as one entity in the second chart.