Animal Equality UK said that Scotland’s “lax” regulatory system has allowed serious incidents to take place across the salmon fishing industry, adding that “far harsher and more proportional penalties” would have been handed out if the same incidents had occurred in other countries.
The NGO found that more than 350,000 salmon have escaped from underwater sea cages in the past five years, with escapes of the nature risking the rapid spread of lice, disease or DNA from farmed animals to wild salmon and trout populations.
Despite more than 70 escape or potential escape incidents being reported to authorities, Animal Equality UK said that none resulted in financial penalties for the Scottish farmed salmon industry.
In Scotland fines are not imposed for fish escapes as this is not considered “a statutory offence for a fish farm to suffer a breach of containment of farmed fish”.
By comparison, in Iceland a salmon producer was fined £656,000 after 80,000 salmon escaped from its farm. Meanwhile, Norwegian authorities imposed a £60,000 fine on the salmon industry after a crane tore a hole in a net, even though no fish escaped during the incident.
Enforcement of legislation in place for aquatic animals in Scotland is overseen by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), the Fish Health Inspectorate (FHI) and the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), with Animal Equality UK collecting the data through Freedom of Information requests.
One such request found that SEPA has witnessed an average of one non-compliance every six days since the middle of 2023, but has issued no financial fines in that period.
In addition to a lack of enforcement for escapes, the charity found that salmon deaths have doubled since 2018, with tens of millions of salmon dying on farms due to disease outbreaks, lice infestations, warming waters, predation and abrasive industry treatments.
“If these same egregious incidents had happened elsewhere, the salmon farming industry would have faced serious financial consequences, as it should,” said Abigail Penny, executive director of Animal Equality UK.
“The Scottish Government’s failure to enforce meaningful penalties allows enormous companies to cut corners at the expense of the environment and animals.
“There is no meaningful deterrent for companies operating in Scotland. The government is letting mass deaths and environmental damage essentially go unchecked. This cannot continue.”
