Cooke Aquaculture's abused farmed atlantic salmon

Cooke Aquaculture's abused farmed atlantic salmon

Subscribe to my channel: https://goo.gl/cl7awD

Cooke Aquaculture Atlantic salmon feedlot, seagull farm and butcher shop

There was a quarantine on this site put in place by the CFIA while this was going on. They had collected dead and live samples of the fish for ISA testing. This is what a quarantine looks like on a fish feedlot.

I would expect that some violation to work safety took place here with workers not wearing their life preservers. Who covers that cost if someone loses their life under those circumstances? Taxpayers as well?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz2G7G... Alexandra's Echo

Cooke Aquaculture's atlantic salmon feedlot, St. Mary's Bay Nova Scotia Feb.21, 2013

This footage was taken Feb. 21 ,2013 four days after the storm. 

Most of the above water nets that keep the birds out are gone. Many of the ropes that keep the bottom nets in place appear to be gone. But, according to Glenn Cooke from Cooke Aquaculture:

"There is no such thing as open pen salmon farming. Our ocean farms, where our salmon spend the latter half of their lives in their natural habitat, are not open. Farms are securely moored on the ocean floor with systems that are designed and built to withstand local conditions by experts right here in Atlantic Canada. A multiple system of durable nets keep the salmon on the farm and the predators out, and our track record of containing our fish has been exemplary."

Quote taken from an opinion piece written by Glenn Cooke titled: "Why we need to farm the oceans"

After most storms in St. Mary's Bay these feedlots are twisted and compromised. This is just another day in the life of NOT open pen feedlots in our oceans. If the fish in these pens didn't have an opportunity to swim away - they floated away. Local fishermen reported seals feasting in the area and many dead sea birds. I would guess the birds were going into the compromised pens, were trapped in them and drowned.

And now this :http://asf.ca/concerns-raised-on-esca...

Get these threats to wild salmon out of our oceans! Putting fish feedlots in our oceans is irresponsible and a crime against nature.

Why Are So Many Chefs Supporting This Toxic Salmon

It seems that more and more chefs are pushing Faroe Island Salmon. The Faroe Islands, located north of Scotland and east of Norway market themselves as a great source of salmon. A wise consumer however, with even a small amount of investigation, will discover that the salmon being touted is farm raised: not wild. They claim sustainable, clean, and pure farm raised salmon. Upon closer inspection, the more I investigate, the more I notice this salmon appearing in the market place at both national and local levels. The increased market presence of this particular salmon seems to have been given a boost by a few nationally and locally recognized chefs.

If you know anything about me or Aroma Thyme then you know we oppose farm-raised salmon. There are many reasons for this. I encourage you to investigate further yourself by checking out the articles and videos that I’ve compiled on my new website: www.NoFarmedSalmon.com. You’ll find documentation covering salmon from farms worldwide.

I acknowledge that salmon farming has come a long way since the 70s, but there are certain elements to open-pen salmon farming that may never be acceptable. Of course, industry proponents say otherwise, while the anti-farmed salmon advocacy groups are filled with those living in communities that are directly and negatively impacted by salmon farms. These community members include scientists, marine biologists, local fisherman and others who may rely upon their local waters for a living.

Again, while in some areas salmon farming practices have moved towards a “sustainable” process, most if not all salmon farms have major flaws to begin with because the whole notion of salmon farming is really built upon flaws that don’t really have any answers.

Farms make claims regarding how excellent and nutritious their finished product is. Sadly, they don’t tell you what the percentage of die off, how much disease effects how much of their overall population, or where and how the refuse (dead carcasses and fish waste) is dumped. Sea lice, for instance, is something that can cause a great deal of damage in a salmon farm. Sea lice can attach themselves to the fry (baby salmon) before they mature and begin growing scales. When a farm is infected, the issue is not necessarily contained to the farm because most, if not nearly all salmon farms at no truly closed systems, but rather more open. In other words, salmon farm “run-off” will find its way into the local water systems (rivers, lakes, streams, bays, etc...) So, once a farm is infected sea lice can find their way to the local wild salmon population. In British Columbia it is estimated that some 60% of wild salmon have been exposed to sea lice from salmon farms. You’d never know this to be the case based upon the self-proclaimed statement found on the Skuna Bay Salmon Farms’ website, “Another wild salmon save.” The sad reality is that these farms are linked to a decline in wild salmon population.

We all know the oft stated, “You are what you eat.” Salmon farms use fish meal pellets that contain an array of non-natural salmon food. Of course the industry claims how great this food is. It's basically ground up fish stolen out of other fisheries from around the world. Instead of these fish being left to feed the local ecosystem they were born in, they are caught, processed, and then fed to farm raised salmon. It can take up to four pounds of wild fish to grow one pound of salmon on a farm. This is yet another major flaw of the so-called sustainable farm raised salmon industry. This is clearly a net deficit not just in the food supply chain, but in other resources as well.

Fish meal isn’t the only thing going into the diet of farm raised salmon. The industry promotes the notion of an “advanced diet” for their salmon. Other item that can find their way into a salmon’s diet is soy, and since soy is used, it is very likely that more often than not it will be genetically modified soy. Additionally, there are farms in Europe that now feed farm raised salmon chicken and pork by-products.

Tell me – on what planet do salmon normally eat soy, chicken and pork? Seriously?!?! Here too I encourage you to do a bit of research to learn what is meant by the term “by-products”. Trust me when I say, you will not be happy in the least.

Let’s return to the Faroe Islands salmon. Essentially since the beginning of farm raised salmon there have been reports of the significant contamination on these farms. Recently, scientists have issued devastating warnings about the dangerous levels of toxic chemicals found in the salmon from Scotland and the Faroe Islands. So serious are these claims that warnings have been issued to NOT eat more than THREE servings per year. With a warning like this, why would you even put one serving into your body?

Researchers discovered that highest concentrations of toxic industrial pollutants (PCBS and dioxins) and agricultural pesticides (toxaphene and dieldrin) in salmon came from the Faroe Islands and Scotland. It was surmised that the fish feed contained oil recovered from the ground-up bodies of tiny sea life harvested in the North Atlantic - a dumping ground for decades for manmade toxins. It was also discovered that fish from Norway performed badly as well. Dr. Foran has also been heard to say that after his involvement with this study, his family would never again eat farmed raised salmon.

The U.S. journal, Science, concluded, "The consumption advice is that no more than one meal every four months should be consumed in order to avoid an increased risk of cancer. Even smaller amounts, it suggested, could trigger harmful effects to brain function and the immune system.”



Don Staniford of the Salmon Farm Protest Group said, "This scientific study blows out of the water the myth that farmed salmon is safe, nutritious and healthy.”



The study did say some of the less contaminated farm-raised salmon comes from Washington and Oregon State.



The safest type of salmon to eat is wild salmon. Further still, look for only Alaskan salmon. In fact Alaska does not allow fish farming so there is no worrying or guessing if it is wild from Alaska.
With all of this data so readily available on the Internet it is beyond me why chefs push farm raised salmon from the Faroe Islands or anywhere else for that matter. When you see the words “farm raised salmon, Faroe Islands, Scottish, etc…” prominently displayed on the menus of the restaurants that you patronize, remember that you would be best to select something else to eat.



As already stated, we recommend wild Alaskan Salmon when you chose to eat salmon.

What’s killing farmed salmon? New virus may also pose risk to wild salmon

     

Farmed fish are an increasingly important food source, with a global harvest now at 110 million tons and growing at more than 8 percent a year. But epidemics of infectious disease threaten this vital industry, including one of its most popular products: farmed Atlantic salmon. Perhaps even more worrisome: these infections can spread to wild fish coming in close proximity to marine pens and fish escaping from them.

Heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI), an often fatal disease, was first detected in salmon on a farm in Norway in 1999, and has now been reported in 417 fish farms in Norway as well as in the United Kingdom. The disease destroys heart and muscle tissue and kills up to 20 percent of infected fish. Although studies have indicated an infectious basis, recent efforts to identify the pathogen causing the disease have been unsuccessful. Now, using cutting-edge molecular techniques, an international team led by W. Ian Lipkin, MD, the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, has found evidence that the disease may be caused by a previously unknown virus. The newly identified virus is related but distinct from previously known reoviruses, which are double-stranded RNA viruses that infect a wide range of vertebrates.

The full study findings are published online in the publication PLoS ONE.

"Our data provide compelling evidence that HSMI is associated with infection with a new reovirus," says Gustavo Palacios, first author of the study and assistant professor of Epidemiology in the Center.

"While there is no evidence that this could spread to humans, it is a threat to aquaculture and it has the potential to spread to wild salmon," added Dr. Lipkin.

To identify the virus, the Columbia University investigators used 454 high throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics, including a new tool called Frequency Analysis of Sequence Data (FASD), pioneered by Raul Rabadan of Columbia's Department of Biomedical Informatics. Investigators in Norway and the U.S. then looked for viral sequences in heart and kidney samples from 29 salmon representing three different HSMI outbreaks and 10 samples from healthy farmed fish. Twenty-eight of the 29 (96.5%) known HSMI samples and none of the 10 healthy salmon samples were positive. The investigators also tested 66 samples obtained from wild salmon living in nine coastal rivers in Norway. The virus was detected in sixteen of these samples (24.2%), though generally in lower concentrations than found in ailing farmed fish.

"The speed of this process, and the enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic created a very fruitful collaboration," says Espen Rimstad, a professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science in Oslo. "Using the expertise of our colleagues at Columbia in high throughput sequencing and advanced bioinformatics, we had within a few weeks the whole genome sequence of a hitherto unknown virus."

Additional research will be needed to confirm that the reovirus is the cause of HSMI. Meanwhile work has already begun in Norway to develop a vaccine to protect farmed Atlantic salmon.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100709210823.htm