Salmon farming in open net pens is risking the very existence of Iceland’s unique wild salmon that inhabited the island long before the first human settlements in the second half of the 9th century.
Iceland’s salmon populations come from a specific evolutionary line. The wild Icelandic salmon population is around 60.000. Each river has its own special salmon clan adapted to the local environment, its birth river, by natural selection for thousands of years.
The world is starting to realise that salmon farming in open net pens is built on terrible suffering and death. The business needs scale and scale brings enormous numbers of parasites, diseases and high mortality of the farmed animals.
Last year 58 million salmon died in Norwegian sea pens. Three million died in pens in the fjord’s of Iceland. In both countries the mortality rate was 15 to 20 percent. This cruelty is literally written into the business model. It’s a feature, not a bug.
This has to stop. We will make it stop.
