One good reason not to eat seafood

My husband and I were cruising on our 10-metre sailing boat on the Intracoastal Waterway near Charleston, South Carolina, when we heard a call come over the radio about a distressed dolphin just ahead of us. We soon came upon the small dolphin, which was hopelessly entangled in what appeared to be a crab pot. The youngster was obviously exhausted and barely able to summon the strength to surface for air. We radioed the Coast Guard but were told they wouldn’t be able to get anybody out for a couple of hours. Looking at the young dolphin struggling to breathe, we feared that he wouldn’t be able to hang on for that long.

We set out an anchor, and my husband hung off the transom with a knife and began sawing away at one of the lines. It was extremely difficult work, since every time he picked up the line, which was wrapped around the dolphin’s tail, it forced the dolphin’s head underwater, and he thrashed in panic. Finally, the line broke, and the dolphin immediately sped forward – but he wasn’t free of all the lines and buoys yet. Right about then, some men in a small motorised skiff came along, and my husband “commandeered” it to pursue the dolphin and remove the rest of the lines. “The dolphin is free,” we later radioed, and cheers went up across the airwaves.

This dolphin and the rescued right whale are not anomalies. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 100,000 marine mammals and a staggering 1 million seabirds die every year because of ingestion of and entanglement in marine debris.

Commercial fishing practices are highly efficient – and highly destructive. Factory fishing trawlers use enormous nets that vacuum up everything in their path. Such nets are believed to be responsible for the deaths of nearly 1,000 marine mammals every single day.

Longline fishing for tuna and swordfish – in which dozens of miles of fishing line is barbed with thousands of hooks – “accidentally” kills hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, sharks, dolphins and albatrosses every year.

Shrimp trawlers may throw up to 85 per cent of their haul back into the sea, making shrimp perhaps the most lethal seafood that a person can eat.

Thanks to such rapacious overfishing, the population of the world’s large predatory fish, such as tuna, swordfish, flounder and cod, has been decimated by 90 per cent since 1950. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, nearly 80 per cent of the world’s fish stocks for which data are available are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted.

Personally, I cannot support such wholesale slaughter on the high seas. Fish are intelligent animals and have been documented using tools. Recent research indicates that dolphins come up with distinct names for each other. An all-you-can-eat meal at the seafood buffet is simply not worth snuffing out the life of one of the last few right whales or loggerhead sea turtles or causing a dolphin to drown in panic.