I have a few gripes with this article as someone well involved in the aquaculture sector in the US particularly. I think it’s fairly biased to put aquaculture in the crosshairs of this study - particularly since the sector is already fighting animal rights groups near 24/7 as it is a much weaker and juicer target compared to the very well established and bolstered poultry, swine and cattle sectors. Despite aquaculture widely being much more environmentally sustainable, and personally I think much more humane than terrestrial commercial animal agriculture. Aquaculture has also struggled for years with getting scientists, aquatic vets and policy makers to come up with cohesive slaughter methodologies that are cost effective and humane as possible. The very wide diversity in the sector and chronic lack of resources from USDA makes it very difficult to adequately even put forth basic guidelines and framework. Many facilities follow AVMA or other Veterinary recommendations but fish are not studied nearly as well as terrestrial animals. There are also pretty strict limits on how you can slaughter animals that are going into the food supply.

It’s great to want to enforce higher welfare standards but my immediate question is how? Tilipia for example can be slaughtered via ice bath slurries humanely because they are a tropical species. So you have a lot of different species that all have different physiologies and would require different enforcement. Meanwhile catfish are the only fish considered livestock under USDA’s full purview, all types of aquaculture are regulated partially by USDA but processing is regulated by FDA, not under USDA’s catfish program.

This is not an easy let’s snap our fingers and fix this issue. Aquaculture is already exists in an extremely complex regulatory framework (29 pieces of federal legislation and 9 federal agencies plus state and local laws).

And this is not a “those evil farmers and processors abusing fish” issue - this is very much an issue that even academics engaging in aquaculture research have struggled with - there is simply just not a lot of good ways to slaughter fish rapidly and efficiently. We have entire conveyor belt systems dedicated to slaughtering swine, poultry and cattle thanks to an animal agriculture sector which has developed over centuries. Aquaculture has not been performed on a large scale in human history until the past 100 years or so, despite the fact humans have been using aquaculture to feed themselves for thousands of years.