Anima is a Danish animal welfare association, which was founded in 2000. We work to ensure that animals are respected, not abused. This applies whether it is about pets, farm animals, fur animals, experimental animals or animals in entertainment.
The diet and lifestyle of a farm salmon and a wild salmon is greatly different- and so is the meat you and your family consume
Although we can’t ask everyone to go vegan, or even vegetarian, it is our responsibility to ensure that the animals we eat have a happy, healthy and cruelty free life.
Caged salmons have little space to move around. Besides making their meat sloppy, the lack of space also results in them becoming aggressive, and hurt or even kill each other. A big mass of salmon so close to each other also means that diseases spread among them like wildfire.
As farming has gone through massive industrialisation, animals fell victim to mass production, where there is no time for fair treatment: around 30% of them gets killed during handling, and even more get injured.
Caged salmons are fed pills that are made of 20% fish and fish oil - those already bringing a lot of unwanted substances - and the rest is a mix of gluten, soy, chicken fat, genetically engineered yeast, Therefore their meat would naturally be grey.
One of the ingredient in these pellets is astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is a strong anti-oxidant which is sometimes made “naturally” through algae or pulverized crustaceans; other times they produce it in labs, using petrochemicals.
A common belief is that is that wild salmon is darker than farmed salmon, therefore farmers strongly colour their fish’ meat. A study revealed that anything colored lower than 23 on SalmoFan (see the colored line) is difficult to sell at any price.
However the colouring process increases the price, and leads to consuming potentially unwanted substances.
salmon farms endanger wild salmons. The farms often lay close to the where the rivers reach the fjords, meaning the baby wild salmons will have to swim past the salmon farms. There they often get attacked by salmon lice, which baby salmon are not yet strong enough to survive.
Another issue is farmed salmon escaping, meaning they compete with wild salmon for food and habitat, and they can spread diseases to wild species.
This means that as wild salmon becomes threatened and fewer in numbers, it will be more difficult to get, and more expensive to buy.
A wild salmon living freely gets to move enough, meaning their meat is more muscular and tasty. They also eat krill and shrimp, therefore their meat is naturally red. Due to their animal based diet, they are also richer in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, than their farmed kin.
Even though wild salmon can be two or three times as expensive as farmed salmon, with a higher nutritional value you have to eat less of it, not to mention the lack of substances you and your family avoids to eat when eating wild salmon.
A small fillet of wild salmon has 131 fewer calories and half the fat content of the same amount of farmed salmon. And farmed salmon has 20.5 percent more saturated fat content — and that's fat you do not want.
It is time we return to acknowledging animals as an important part of our lives, and give them the respect and effort they deserve to be treated with.