Your Food

Fish certification labels

What do fish labels really mean?

Every day farmed and wild-caught fish are treated (and killed) in cruel ways. Hidden far from the public eye, fish suffer immensely on factory farms and when caught in the wild.

When on the lookout for higher welfare fish in supermarkets and restaurants, many people turn to the five largest certification labeling schemes for guidance:

However, Compassion in World Farming investigated the welfare standards of these certifications and exposed a shocking truth: fish certified by these labels may suffer in many ways. Many live miserable lives in overcrowded tanks and cages. Others endure prolonged and painful deaths. Practices allowed by some of these certifications include:

Starving fish for up to 14 days
Overcrowding fish in tanks or sea cages.
Inflicting a slow, painful death without adequate stunning
Shooting wild seals and harming dolphins.

Like other animals, fish are emotional, complex beings. They can suffer; they can feel pain. Yet they suffer in silence by the billions.

Without a voice of their own, they need us to speak up on their behalf. These certifications tend to focus on the sustainability of fish stocks and the environment, which is important work. But they could also protect fish welfare.

Currently, some certifications have little or no welfare protections in place. They must do more for the fish they certify. We analyzed and compared the different certifications’ welfare standards against eight key criteria – such as starving the fish, killing wildlife and allowing fish to suffer slow, painful deaths – and determined where improvements are desperately needed. See our table below to find out more about the level of welfare protection provided by each certification.

What does each label permit?

The standards for each criterion vary across each certification program. Click on the boxes to find out what each label actually permits.

Marine Stewardship Council

Friend of the Sea

Aquaculture Stewardship Council

Best Aquaculture Practice

GlobalG.A.P.

Find out more about the welfare criteria

Just like in a typical land factory farm, huge numbers of fish are reared in underwater factory farms. To ensure maximum profit, farmers tightly pack many thousands of fish into underwater cages and tanks. These farms are crowded, barren places where the fish have little else to do other than swim in endless circles.

When there is a high number of animals crowded onto a farm, as with land animals like chickens and pigs, fish can suffer poor welfare. Overcrowding can cause stress, and this can result in poor water quality, stress and aggression.

Water quality is important for fish welfare. Good water quality can ensure that the fish have adequate oxygen to breathe comfortably and reduces the prevalence of disease. Fish excrete into the water, so when lots of fish are in a small space, waste products such as ammonia can build up to dangerous levels. The resulting poor water quality can significantly impact a fish’s well-being.

Fish also need enough space to swim and behave normally. Having the ability to choose to be in certain areas of the cage to adjust to different temperatures and light is essential for higher welfare – and this is restricted in higher stocking densities. It has even been shown that fish may suffer from sunburn if they are forced too close to the surface of the water.

Fish are often given antibiotics in their feed to prevent the spread of various diseases which may occur in intensive conditions. Fish are kept in such huge numbers that diagnosis, separation and treatment of an individual fish is impossible.

However, as with land animals, there are issues when fish are given feed containing antibiotics as a preventative measure, or where all animals in the group are treated even though only a few are sick. Use of antibiotics in this way means that the fish may be more able to survive in overcrowded and dirty conditions, but antibiotics should not be used as a substitute for proper hygiene and husbandry.

When antibiotics are given to fish in an open environment like a sea cage, antibiotics will leak out from the farm. Some studies looking at sediment beneath sea cages have found antibiotic-resistant genes – even several kilometers away from the farms. In general, microbes can become resistant to antibiotics faster the more they are used. This risks the future effectiveness of antibiotics – even for humans.

Birds, seals, sea lions, walruses and otters are predators of farmed fish in sea cages, land-based tanks or pond farming systems. Also, dolphins and wild fish such as swordfish and bluefin tuna predate on farmed fish. These animals can damage nets, leading to fish escapes, and eat or stress the farmed fish. Farmers often can take harmful or lethal measures to control these predators.

Some farms use tools called acoustic deterrent devices (ADD) to keep aquatic mammals away. These devices use random frequency sweeps and tones to unsettle approaching animals. Other devices use sound pressure at a specific frequency to cause discomfort to animals if they come within close range. These devices can cause long-term damage to the hearing of the seals, dolphins and whales that swim into the areas surrounding farms. Hearing is a critical sense to these animals, who depend on their hearing for navigating, finding food and communicating underwater, so the results can be devastating.

In some European countries, pond systems have problems with predation by otters and beavers. Both otters and beavers are frequently culled despite their protected status.

Before certain procedures that require fish to be crowded and handled, such as transport or slaughter, fish are starved for some time.

In certain cases and durations of between 1-3 days, this is deemed necessary to not further harm the fish – clearing the gut before transport for example means that there is less waste excreted into the water while fish are transported, and bad water quality from excreted substances will harm the fish.

However, fish are regularly starved for far longer than necessary – sometimes even up to 2 weeks. This may be to boost profits by saving money on feed. The fish suffer from hunger and frustration at not being able to search for food, which can result in aggression.

Intensive farms are completely barren and vastly different from the natural habitats that fish would find in the wild. As with other farmed animals, good welfare means giving fish an environment that is similar to conditions in the wild and complex enough to meet their behavioral and mental needs.

Fish can suffer from boredom and frustration too. Barren environments limit the expression of natural behaviors, resulting in negative impacts on the physical and mental health of the animals, with many experiencing inescapable boredom.

Environmental enrichment involves deliberately increasing environmental complexity to improve welfare. There are a growing number of studies showing various welfare benefits of enrichment for fish - there is evidence for reduced aggressive interactions, a reduction in disease and injuries, improved cognitive capacity and exploration, reduced impact from stressors, improved foraging ability, and decreases in larval deformity and mortality.

Enrichments that allow the fish some level of control over their environment can include shelters (e.g. pipes or shells), changing the color of the tank, self-activated fish feeders or adding a cover to the top to create a shade. There are even some examples of music having a positive effect on fish growth.

We face a global crisis of overfishing.

Fish farming is responsible for much of the industrial fishing of our decimated oceans. Many widely farmed species such as trout and salmon hunt other fish in the wild. In order to farm these animals, they are fed fish feed that is made of wild-caught fish. Approximately one-quarter of all wild-caught fish are used to make fish feed. This comprises of somewhere between 450 billion and 1 trillion fish. In other words, it can take up to 350 wild-caught fish to raise a single farmed salmon, so fish farming actually increases the pressure on wild stocks.

Since these wild fish die without any form of humane slaughter or prior stunning, the welfare cost of the fish feed is massive.

Most fish are caught by huge industrial fishing vessels. Many are caught by trawling vessels that scoop up hundreds of thousands of fish in one go, and they are crushed together in the nets causing injury and death. Those that survive the capture are left to suffocate on decks or are gutted alive.

Fish are sentient and can feel pain fear and suffer. Therefore, slow, painful slaughter without prior stunning is a horrific ordeal for the fish.

Many farmed fish are killed using methods that are painful and stressful and their suffering can sometime last hours. Some will be left to suffocate to death in tanks of ice slurry.

Wild-caught fish also frequently die in slow and painful ways. Many of the ways of capturing wild fish can cause the fish to be crushed to death, suffer from the pressure change of being pulled from the depths of the ocean, or be dragged along a line with a painful hook in their mouths for over a day. Those that survive the capture are left to suffocate on decks or are gutted alive.

Rethink Fish

Billions of fish, whether farmed or wild-caught, routinely endure truly terrifying treatment. Farmed fish are often kept in barren pens with nothing to do but swim listlessly in circles for many months, a far cry from their life in the wild able to migrate thousands of miles across the world. Farmed fish are deliberately starved for as many as 2 weeks before slaughter. And when they are killed, the vast majority are slaughtered whilst fully conscious, taking up to an hour to die.

This must change – fish deserve lives worth living.

And the public agrees. In a Yagree survey, four out of five adults said they would like to see information about fish welfare on the labels of fish products. Help us create a future where fish are protected by the schemes that certify them.

Want to know more? See our food business species-specific recommendations.