Is the fishing industry humane?

There's a lot of noise these days about the unsustainable nature of the meat-and-dairy industry, particularly in the United States. Such criticisms target the vast amount of resources that the meat-and-dairy industry consumes, the utterly shocking conditions under which most animals are housed, and the unhealthily high level of antibiotics and other chemicals being pumped into these creatures to maximize their yield. There are clearly serious issues at stake here, although there are no straightforward non-ideological answers.

But what happens under water? What sorts of practices are employed by the fishing industry? How sustainable are our massive yields? Peter Singer's terrifying article called "If Fish Could Scream" argues that our current practices are morally indefensible and ecologically utterly unsustainable.

He writes:

There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish. Fish caught in nets by trawlers are dumped on board the ship and allowed to suffocate. Impaling live bait on hooks is a common commercial practice: long-line fishing, for example, uses hundreds or even thousands of hooks on a single line that may be 50-100 kilometers long. When fish take the bait, they are likely to remain caught for many hours before the line is hauled in.

A hundred-kilometre long fishing line! If that doesn't give you a sense of scale, then consider this:

Alison Mood, the [author of a report called Worse things happen at sea: the welfare of wild-caught fish], has put together what may well be the first-ever systematic estimate of the size of the annual global capture of wild fish. It is, she calculates, in the order of one trillion, although it could be as high as 2.7 trillion.

To put this in perspective, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 60 billion animals are killed each year for human consumption – the equivalent of about nine animals for each human being on the planet. If we take Mood’s lower estimate of one trillion, the comparable figure for fish is 150. This does not include billions of fish caught illegally nor unwanted fish accidentally caught and discarded, nor does it count fish impaled on hooks as bait.

The scale of this slaughter is immense, and the waste enormous. But what makes it worse is that recent research shows, according to Singer, that fish clearly feel pain just like mammals do and take measures to avoid it. It's just that we don't see most of it, and so we don't stop to care.

But even if we don't care about the morality of very large-scale fish harvesting, we should stop to consider the ecology of it. I can't find the link now, but I remember reading recently that fishery yields are dropping precipitously, suggesting that we may have crossed "peak fish" and that the major fishing grounds are now headed for collapse.