Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident - except not really by accident, since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounnt of bycatch. Take shrimp for example. The average shrimp trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight., but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there la belling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read : 26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of this shrimp. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 05:04:01 +0000
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