‘I’m a vegetarian but I eat fish.’ Have you ever heard anyone say that? I always want to ask them what they think a fish is – a distant relation of a carrot, second cousin to a cauliflower? They certainly won’t grow in your greenhouse!

Poor old fish have always had the raw end of the deal and I’m sure it’s because some bright spark came up with the notion that they don’t feel pain. Just think about that for a minute. Fish have livers and stomachs, blood, eyes and ears – in fact most of the internal bits that we have – but they don’t feel pain? Then why have they got a central nervous system, the thing responsible for carrying messages to and from the brain, including feelings of pain? Of course fish feel pain – it’s part of the survival mechanism which has enabled them to last the tens of millions of years they have.

Despite their ability to feel, there are no rules or regulations governing the way fish are killed. You can do more or less what you want to them, and just about everyone does. Most are killed by being gutted with a knife, usually while they’re still alive, or they’re tossed into bins and allowed to suffocate in a totally alien environment.

To find out about fishing I once sailed on a trawler and I was disgusted at what I saw. I found lots of things upsetting but worst of all was what happened to a big orange-speckled flat fish – a plaice. It was tossed into a bin with other flat fish and four hours later I literally heard it croaking. I pointed out to one of the deckhands who, without even thinking about it, clubbed the fish. It was, I thought, better than suffocating and I presumed it had been killed. Six hours later I noticed that its mouth and gill covers were still opening and closing as it struggled for oxygen. Its misery had lasted ten hours.

Every possible method of catching fish has been thought of and used. In the boat I sailed on, a big, heavy, open-mouthed net called a trawl was used. Heavy boards keep the net on the sea bed and as they are pulled along, they crunch and grind over the sand, killing hundreds of different life forms. As the fish caught in the nets are brought up from the ocean depths, their swim bladders may burst or their eyes balloon out because of the difference in pressure. Often fish ‘drown’ because they are so crushed in the net under the weight of other fish that their gills can’t work. As well as the fish that are caught, many other creatures are netted – including starfish, crabs and shell fish. These are simply shovelled back into the sea to die. Despite this, trawling is one of the most common methods of fishing in the world today.

There are some rules governing fishing – mainly about such things as the size of fishing nets and who can fish where. These are made by individual countries about their own coastal waters. Countries also have rules about how many and which types of fish can be caught. They call them fish quotas. It may sound like a sensible way of making sure that not too many fish are caught, but in fact it’s nothing of the sort. It’s just a crude attempt to share out what fish there are left.

In Europe, fish quotas work like this: let’s take haddock and cod as an example. When a boat has caught all the haddock the rules allow, it’s supposed to stop fishing for them but it can continue fishing for cod. As cod and haddock usually swim together, when the net is hauled in there will be haddock in as well as cod. What the captain sometimes does is hide these illegal haddock in secret parts of the boat. More likely, they’ll be thrown back in the sea. But there’s one big problem – they’re already dead! It’s estimated that about 40 per cent more haddock than the quota allows are killed in this way. Unfortunately, it isn’t just haddock which are affected by these crazy rules. It affects every species of fish covered by the quota system.

In the big, open oceans of the world or around the coasts of poorer countries, there are very few controls. In fact, there are so few regulations that something called biomass fishing has suddenly appeared. In this type of fishing, very fine mesh nets scoop every living thing from the water. Not even the smallest fish or tiniest crab survives.

All over the Southern oceans, a new and particularly disgusting type of fishing called finning has also come to light. Sharks are the target and when they’re caught their fins are cut from them while they’re still alive. Then the fish are dropped back to die of shock and drowning. This happens to over 100 million sharks every year. And all for shark’s fin soup, sold in Chinese restaurants all over the world.

Another common method of fishing involves purse seine nets. These nets are used to form a circle around huge shoals and scoop out every single fish. The size of the mesh may allow the smallest fish to escape but so many adults fish are caught that the ones that are left can’t breed fast enough to make up the loss. Sadly, this type of fishing also frequently catches dolphins and other sea mammals. Other methods of fishing include long lines, where thousands of baited hooks are attached to lines stretching several kilometres. These can be used over rocky sea beds which would tear a net to pieces. Explosives and poisons such as bleach are all part of the onslaught on the oceans and these too kill many more creatures than fish.

Probably the most destructive of all fishing methods is drift netting. Made from thin but strong nylon, these nets are almost invisible in water and dangle from the surface to form what have been called ‘walls of death’. This name came about because of the large number of creatures which swim into the nest and die – dolphins, small whales, seals, sea birds, rays and sharks. They are all discarded because the only thing the fishermen are really after is the tuna fish. Over a million dolphins alone die every year because of drift nets – drowned because they are unable to get to the surface to breathe.

Drift nets are now used all over the world and have recently appeared in Britain and Europe, where the nest are limited to about 2.5kms in length. Out in the middle of big oceans such as the Pacific and the Atlantic, where few controls exist, nest can stretch for 30kms or more. Sometimes these long nets break free during a storm and drift around, continuing to catch and kill animals. Finally, when the net is weighed down with dead bodies, it sinks to the bottom. Over time, the bodies rot away and then the net floats back up to the surface of the ocean to continue its pointless destruction.

Nearly 100 million tonnes of fish are dragged from the sea by commercial fishing fleets every year, many caught before they’re even old enough to breed, guaranteeing that the oceans cannot replenish themselves. And every year the situation gets worse. Every time someone – such as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (UNFAO) - gives another warning about the damage being done it’s just ignored. Everyone knows the seas are dying but no one wants to be the first to stop fishing – there’s just too much money involved.

Since World War Two, the world’s oceans and seas have been divided up into 17 fishing areas. Today, nine of these ‘are facing catastrophic declines in some species’, says UNFAO. The remaining eight areas are almost as bad, mostly due to over fishing.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) – the world’s leading scientific expert on the seas and oceans – is also extremely worried about what’s happening. It says that the huge shoals of mackerel which used to swim around the North Sea are now commercially extinct – not enough exist for fishermen to catch and sell. It also warns that in another five years one of the most common European species of all, the cod, will be entirely extinct. All of which is fine – if you like jellyfish. Because that, they fear, is all that will remain.

What’s even worse is that much of the time, the animals taken from the seas don’t even end up on someone’s plate. They are turned into fertilisers to make crops grow or are used to make shoe polish or candles. They’re also used to feed farm animals, including farmed fish. Can you believe that? We catch masses of fish, process them, turn them into pellets and feed them to other fish! It takes about 4 pounds of wild fish to produce a pound of farmed fish, the other 3 pounds being pooed away.

Some people think farming fish is the answer to the ocean’s problems but it’s as destructive as fishing. Millions of fish are packed into cages on the coastlines of the world’s oceans, and coastal mangrove swamps are being cut down at a terrifying rate to make way for these farms. In places like the Philippines, Kenya, India and Thailand, more than 70 per cent of the country’s mangrove forests have gone – and they’re still cutting.

Yet mangrove forests are so rich in life that over 2000 different plants and animals live in them. They are also breeding grounds for over 80 per cent of the world’s marine fish species. These amazing areas are the nurseries of the seas and as they die, the oceans die too.

The fish farms which replace them pollute the water, covering the sea bed with uneaten food pellets and excreta which smothers all life. Cramming fish into cages makes them more vulnerable to disease so the fish are given antibiotics while insecticides are used to kill parasites such as sea lice. After just a few years, the environment is so badly damaged that the fish farms have to move on, cutting down more mangroves as they go.

In Norway and Britain – mostly in the fjords and Scottish lochs – fish farms are used for raising Atlantic salmon. In its natural state, this free-swimming fish roams far and wide, from tiny mountain stream to the deep Atlantic Ocean off Greenland. It is so powerful that it can leap over waterfalls or swim directly up cascading water. Humans have tried to breed these instincts out of the salmon and have imprisoned it in metal pens in its millions.

All the problems of pollution apply to salmon farming just as they do to fish farming elsewhere in the world, and all add their bit to the demise of our seas.

As the seas and oceans collapse, it isn’t just humans who are affected. Just imagine what is happening to the birds, seals, dolphins and other creatures who need fish to live. They’re already struggling to survive and their future looks fairly grim. So shouldn’t we leave the fish for them?

‘The environmental reasons for not eating fish are overwhelming’
- Michaela Strachan, TV presenter
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‘ If I look at the amount of fish being vacuumed off the sea bed to provide fodder for humans and livestock it bewilders me. It’s all so unnecessary.’
- Jeff Banks, designer and Clothes Show presenter