Consider the Mort

vladiC raviCH CONSIDER THE MORT EXAMINinG THE LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE underBellieS OF THE FISH-PAIN DEBATE discussed: Five Black Chutes, Humanity’s Earliest Triumphs of Husbandry, Rotary Club Signage, A Strip-Mall Starbucks, A Decerebrate Cat, Sham Rage, The November 1874 Edition of Scientific American, The Human Urge for Narrative, Your Favorite Stuffed Animal, Scientists Rolling Their Eyes, Kafka or a salmon in Can- through which blood is pumped out of ada, the fish harvest its body by a still-beating heart. The fish ends with a slippery are dead before coming to, and, silent as slide through one of loaves of bread, they push one another five black chutes. Half- into the freezer in the ship’s hold. Fway down, a piston squeezes out a puff The salmon harvest begins when an of exhaust as a pneumatic hammer strikes the fish on the “air stone” is put into the water at the front of the trough, back of the head at more than sixty miles per hour. The which is a huge pocket of netting where a few thousand salmon slides sideways onto the bleeding-table, its visible salmon are slowly being corralled. The air stone releases a eye unnaturally still. That’s how you know it’s stunned, ex- surge of bubbles that creates motion in the water, and the plains Jason Stalker, the harvest master for Marine Harvest, salmon turn to face it, riding the current. “You see, they’re a multinational aquaculture company in Campbell River, lined up good, like firewood,” Stalker points out. One by British Columbia, that slaughters thirty thousand fish ev- one, the fish are sucked through a tube and into the mini- ery day. Now the salmon is ready for a quick cut of the gills, van-sized SI~5 stunner bolted to the stern of a nearby ship. 19 Illustration by Tony Millionaire Above the water, Marine Harvest’s out anything unusual,” he said, ask- market. I’ve caught exactly one fish Thurlow Point fish farm is little more ing that I not include his name or in my life: watching it slap the waves than a grid of floating steel walkways. home state. “Just driving forklifts full with a frantic tail, I felt a rising strand A few strands of rope divide the water of Dumpsters of dead and dying fish, of anxiety as I reeled it in. What now? beneath them into ten soccer field– you really want to avoid that.” I held its slimy length long enough sized pens, and the only structure is a I have come to British Colum- to remove the hook and scrambled fish-feed warehouse. The salmon are bia to see what humane fish slaughter around for a rock to bludgeon it with. military-fatigue green, with phospho- looks like, but like a hundred phi- The aquaculture industry calls this rescent scales, black spots along their losophers before me, I cannot know “percussive stunning” and performs backs, and slick white bellies. Every exactly what the still-living morts lan- it with a machine or a black baton few minutes, a fish jumps across the guishing in the bucket feel, if anything. nicknamed “the priest.” It worked for surface of the water—there are half a In the moment, the answer seems ob- a few minutes, until the fish flipped a million of them between nets in this vious to me: what animal weighing fif- foot into the air, still shamelessly alive. stretch of ocean. teen pounds does not feel pain? We know almost nothing about The harvest must be highly cho- The skipper welcomes me with the life of a salmon before it lands reographed because calm fish yield a broad smile and a big hand. Con- on our plate. Fish have physical traits higher-quality flesh. Panic in the wa- verting his commercial fishing boat we cannot fathom: imagine a line of ter means bruising and a product that to work with aquaculture producers nerves around your body that can de- doesn’t last as long on the shelf. Un- was a simple business decision, but tect electricity and shifts in the move- til they’re stunned, the thick bodies of it also echoes humanity’s earliest tri- ment of water. From the perspective the salmon also pose a danger to the umphs of husbandry: he had shifted of a bipedal primate with only five workers. from catching fish in the wild to har- senses, the thirty-two thousand spe- For every fifteen or so stunned vesting them on a farm. cies of fish that make up the largest salmon, one emerges from the harvest Notepad in hand, I finally get to and most diverse group of vertebrates box still writhing, arching its body the question that has brought me are easier to describe by what they into a crescent and slamming its mus- here: is this stunner a more humane lack: no fur, no arms or legs, and not cular tail against the table. The fish- way to slaughter the fish? He paus- much of a face. farm workers spend the day grabbing es and looks at me, squinting, the these frantic exceptions and shoving bright December sun in his eyes. “It ow can anyone know them headfirst into a smaller manu- does make for better steaks,” he fi- “ a fish really suffers?” al stunner, which makes a sound like nally says. I can feel a caricature of H asked the fisher- a staple gun. A few get their gills cut myself being drafted in his mind. man who gave me a lift somewhere while still very much unstunned. The skipper has executed and sold along Highway 19. “I want to keep A few feet from the bleeding table, countless fish over the years, and like my life simple,” he continued, feed- I see a bucket of “morts”: fish either many of the estimated 200 million ing a cracker with cream cheese and dead or deemed unfit to remain with people in the world who make their salmon to the old beagle resting be- the living. A former fish-farm work- living from fisheries and aquacul- tween my feet on the passenger-seat er on the East Coast had told me how ture, he either does not believe the floor. crucial it is to remove the morts, as fish can suffer or is not troubled by With its netting-repair shop and they might spread parasites or disease the question. harbor tight with boats, Campbell to the entire stock—or, in the case of Growing up in New York City, River is a fish town. Located about open-ocean farming, beyond. “After I wasn’t exposed to fishing, or even to twenty miles south of the Thur- working through a few mass deaths, I live fish, unless they were in aquari- low Point fish farm, it is the home became more hard-line about culling ums or expiring outside a Chinatown base for much of the aquaculture 20 and recreational-fishing businesses to interview him on the ethics of his defenders of natural habitats can rely around Vancouver Island. Here the sport. I asked him directly: if a fish on an economic argument alongside Tyee (a local name for the Chinook were an eagle, would it be ethical to their spiritual one. Just as the ancient salmon) is as much a spiritual sym- hook him, play him until he was ex- inhabitants of this land both wor- bol of nature as it is a smiling car- hausted, and then drown him? “Fish shiped and slaughtered the delicious toon stenciled on storefronts—the aren’t eagles,” Maynard said. “Salmon Tyee, there remains today both a love streamlined fish consistently appears are tough critters. They’ve evolved to for fish and a certain lust for the sport on Rotary Club signs, totem poles, go over waterfalls.” of catching them. and T-shirts. Yet Jeremy Maynard trains his Gerry Blackmun didn’t care The first exhibit in the Campbell fishing guides in how to dispatch much if I quoted him. “Screw it,” he River Museum is a display of Na- their catch quickly. He does not use said. “I’m retired.” Gerry spent his tive American wide canoes, formida- stringers, a series of hooks that attach career at the Canadian Department ble clubs, knives, and great yawning to the face, lips, or gills and are mar- of Fisheries and Oceans and per- hooks the size and color of sausage— keted to “keep fish alive and easy to formed the environmental-impact all devoted to both killing and honor- count,” and that are banned in sever- study for the estuary that once ex- ing the enigmatic salmon. There’s an al Canadian provinces. isted under the strip-mall Starbucks entire wing honoring the fishing and In fishing, there are ethics and where I met him. “It’s just money canning industries. there is etiquette: “Without fighting talks and bullshit walks,” he said, re- Before the beginning of the the fish, there’s no recreation,” said ferring to one or all of the fish-related twentieth century, the fishing in- Maynard. “There’s no sport in that.” industries in town. He recalled how dustry involved little more than Pain or no pain, the salmon should commercial fishermen flouted their catching a meal, but as seine nets have a chance at escaping. “All to the quotas and how the fish farms pollut- crisscrossed the waters and loggers end that our brave Tyee may have a ed the waters. His friend runs a tour- cut into the cedar forests, the envi- fair fight” is the Tyee Club motto.

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