Animal Welfare Observatory: what’s wrong with him suffering inspiresI in the Spanish fish farms: Him Animal Welfare Observatory launches the first awareness campaign about animal suffering in Spanish fish farms. He Animal Welfare Observatory (OBA) start with the first campaign by animal welfare of fish in Spain, asking the Castilian company to publish a commitment to stunning prior to slaughter by 2026. The Piszolla SLU company has been denounced by the Animal Welfare Observatory (OBA) due to an alleged non-compliance with law 32/2007 in the fish slaughter process.
In 2022, the Franz Weber Foundation published, for the first time in Spain, a study on the living conditions of fish, mainly trout, in Spanish fish farms.
In the photos, a fish farm worker admits that it takes an hour and a half for fish to die by slaughtering them on ice. The animals are thrown into barrels filled with ice, where they pile up and die of suffocation due to lack of oxygen..
Ice slaughter is a widespread practice in Spanish fish farms, which also does not require prior stunning.
This method of slaughter is discouraged by the scientific community, as well as by the European Union and other authorities, due to the unnecessary suffering What it means for these animals. Consists of the immersion of live fish in a mixture of ice and water, or directly in ice, causing the animals to die from hypothermia or suffocation. Because cooling reduces metabolism and oxygen requirements, can prolong the painand some cold-adapted species take more than an hour to die.
Some pieces of the video, which correspond to the Piszolla fish farm in Alba de Tormes, Salamanca, show workers stacking the fish by pushing a panel into the water so that they can be removed more quickly with the machines. I know too shows how some fish still regain consciousness and enter the hemorrhage phase.
He Animal Welfare Observatory has filed an administrative complaint against the Piszolla company, due to an alleged very serious violation of slaughter practices, by youusing methods that do not correspond to scientific recommendations to prevent suffering.
Piszolla is currently the main producer of trout in Spain, with fish farms in the municipalities of Alba de Tormes, Illana, Encinas de Arriba and Fuentidueña. The company is part of the Aqualande business group, which owns a French manufacturer 40 fish factories between Spain and Francefor which the French organization L214 was already charged in 2018 bad habits in its facilities.
In Spain, Law 32/2007 for the Care of Animals, Exploitation, Transport, Experimentation and Slaughter requires that all production vertebrate animals be stunned before slaughter.. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published this in 2009. a scientific opinion which made it clear that suffocation on ice is one of the worst methods in terms of animal welfare and recommended that “the most appropriate stunning and killing methods with regard to animal welfare should be selected for each species.”
Even the Spanish Aquaculture Business Association (Apromar) itself, in her Guide to fish welfare in Spanish aquaculture, recommends the use of a method that causes “rapid loss of consciousness in fish,” and acknowledges that “the World Organization for Animal Health recommends against its use.” [el del sacrificio en hielo] because it has been scientifically proven to cause a lot of stress, anxiety and suffering in fish.”
Several fish farms in Spain have already publicly committed to this replacing their slaughter systems with more humane electrical stunning systems with specific dates and reporting of the type of alternative stunning, but the largest trout producer in Spain, Piszolla SLU, has not yet done so.
For these reasons the Animal Welfare Observatory launches, for the first time in Spain, a awareness campaign on fish welfare, asking Piszolla for a public commitment to more humane slaughter in its fish farms with a deadline of 2026, and informing about the type of alternative stunning.
In the words of Míriam Martínez, head of fish welfare at OBA: “Piszolla must stop this suffering and urgently change his practices. Prolonging the suffering of these animals in their final moments is cruel and a solution must be found now.”
Piszolla received one and a half million euros between the Center for Technological Development and Innovation and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund to modernize their agricultural holdings, through a project whose primary goal was to improve animal welfare.
Martínez adds: “Piszolla is a company with resources, it is part of the French group Aqualande, which achieved a turnover of 130 million euros in 2022. Publicly engaging on his website is proof that his words become facts. Many companies already commit, for transparency, directly from their website and report the kind astonishing that they will use.”