Salmon farm faces new cruelty claims as Trump seeks to supersize fish farming

The Trump administration is keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood. But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted. A major seafood company is again under investigation over allegations of animal abuse after a second undercover video taken at a salmon breeding farm in Maine appeared to show cruel treatment of fish and environmentally harmful practices. The covert video taken by the Animal Outlook activist group, which it sent to the Guardian, shows staff at the Cooke Aquaculture salmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine, clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhe on the ground and in one instance cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also prevalent in the fish, according to Animal Outlook. A fish with apparent fungal infection. Photograph: Courtesy Animal Outlook Employees told the undercover activist that they give the fish feed contaminated by rats, have mistakenly let penned fish escape into surrounding wild waterways and that they kill thousands of fish because they have produced too many of them. “Unfortunately I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” one worker states on the video. …