Usually “solutions” offered by humans end up hurting more animals or hurting animals more severely, and in many cases both. One of these cases is fish farming.
In the last post we discussed how as a consequence of the reduction in marine animals capture from the oceans in the last few decades, humans hurt marine animals even more severely by intensively farming billions of them. A lifetime of dense confinement in waste filled water, exposure to diseases and other bodily harms due to genetic manipulation are forced upon the fishes as a direct result of the decision to switch to farming. The other, less known result is widening the scope of abuse even further. As a consequence of farming fishes, many of which are of carnivorous species, even more fishes are captured from the oceans, to feed the fishes confined in the farms.

It is estimated that every year between 450 billion and one trillion fishes are purposely caught specifically to be grind up into fishmeal and fish oil, which are mostly used as food for other animals humans rear for food, mainly farmed fishes.

Virtually any fish or shellfish in the sea can be grind up into fishmeal and fish oil, but they are usually produced from small marine fishes that are considered not suitable for direct human consumption.

These sentient beings, hundreds of billions of them, are even more invisible than the hundreds of billions of sentient beings that humans directly consume.

The status of directly consumed fishes is so low, that many self-described vegetarians tranquilly consume them without even considering their moral status. So what is the status of the fishes who are used as food for the fishes who are used as food for humans?

Fishes are the lowest of the low among the industrially exploited animals of the world.
In a post called rock-bottom, we argued that fishes are so low at the bottom of the world’s strict hierarchy, that they are absolutely transparent, the outmost absent referent. The fishes they are fed with, are even beneath rock-bottom.

If fishes that humans consume are not even counted by the industry as single “items” but in kilograms and tones, and even among the animal liberation movement their misery is rather concealed, probably because activists know how little empathy fishes raise among humans, when will the time of the fishes that are eaten by the fishes humans eat, come?