The association L214 denounces this Friday the conditions for rearing fish using a video filmed camera hidden in facilities in New Aquitaine. The group Aqualande, targeted by the investigation of the association, defends itself in a statement.
The association L214, which defends the animal cause by denouncing the sometimes unworthy conditions with which the animals are slaughtered in France, made public this Friday on its site a video on the conditions of breeding of rainbow trouts.
The sequence was shot in hidden camera, as the association has now become accustomed to in recent years, in facilities located in New Aquitaine and belonging to the group Aqualande, the main French producer, and also the largest European producer of trout.
For the association, trout are "sentient beings in the same way as mammals" , "victims of intensive farming in France and Europe" . A production that is not according to L214 "framed by any specific regulations on animal protection" .
Cloudy water, lesions, overpopulation ...
The association, which has shot thanks to a camera immersed, ensures that fish live in "a particularly turbid water, saturated with food residues and trout droppings" , which prevents good oxygenation of animals. The trout filmed also present "wounds and lesions" , the causes of which can be varied, says the association before listing them: "bacterial or viral infections, excess of UV light, nutritional deficiencies, attacks of predators ..." These lesions can also be caused by trout between them because of overpopulation in the basins.
Based on these findings, L214 requests that "an information mission on the conditions of rearing and slaughtering in the fish industry be immediately put in place in the National Assembly or the Senate" .
"The images are misleading," says the group
The Aqualande group responded in a statement quoted by AFP: "The images are misleading because the fish are grouped in schools. Our fish have the space to be healthy and develop normally .
"There is a small percentage of mortality in fish farming, less than 2%, which is lower than mortality in the wild," said AFP Stéphane Dargelas, commercial director, marketing and communication. He pointed out that AQUALAND used antibiotics very rarely, proof that the vaccinated fish are "in good health" and that the turbid water is due to organic waste from the river crossing the basins.
On Monday, another association concerned with animal welfare, CIWF (Compassion in World Farming), also released a film and a report on how fish are slaughtered in the European Union.
CIWF considers in particular that the killing technique used in these farms is "not acceptable" because "painful and too long" . It is "chilling with ice" or a simple "exposure to the air for them to suffocate".
"A long agony"
"Some bream are killed by being out of the water, but this is causing a very stressful death, with a long agony," says CIWF.
For the bar, of which Europe produced more than 69,000 tonnes in 2015, more than half in Greece, with Spain being the second largest producer, CIWF also denounces "asphyxiation in the ice" .
The NGO stresses that the International Organization for Animal Health (OIE) has recommended that these techniques not be used "if alternative methods can be put in place," says CIWF.
"The most promising technique is electrical stunning followed by cooling in the ice," says the NGO, which calls on the Ministry of Agriculture to "amend the regulation on the slaughter of farmed fish."