It also eliminates an important food source for many other sea animals such as birds, seals, whales and porpoises. As long as consumer demand for fish exceeds the ability of fish stocks to recover, entire species will continue to disappear. One Canadian fisherman admitted in 1990 that his ship dumped 100,000 pounds of undersized cod at sea on a single trip. For every shrimp caught by US boats in the Gulf of Mexico at least four non-target fish are discarded. Unselective nets swallow up everything in their path, resulting in 12 to 20 billion pounds of unwanted fish, turtles, dolphins, and sea birds being thrown away.
Plastic garbage is known to kill as many as a million sea creatures a year.
Like the beef industry, the fishing industry is very energy intensive. It take 20 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy from fish, making it 50 to 100 times more energy intensive than the production of plant food. You d think that commercial fishing only feeds humans but according to John Robbins, more than half of all fish caught are ground up and fed to livestock. It is well known that western industrial coun-tries consume more than their fair share of the world s beef but the situation is no different for fish consumption. Our concept of equality in all human beings is not based on an arbitrary characteristic like intelligence, sex, or skin colour, but on the simple fact that we all have the same capacity for suffering and enjoyment and should therefore be treated equally.