Wild salmon are in trouble. Salmon farmers, anglers and conservationists should all agree on that. The harder question is what we do about it.
The Scottish Government has identified more than 40 pressures on wild salmon. Yet campaign groups WildFish and the Green Britain Foundation have a much simpler answer: blame salmon farming and shut it down.
The agenda behind the claims
They should be honest about the agenda they bring to the debate. WildFish once argued for reform and alternatives such as land-based production. It now campaigns against salmon farming in all forms. Last year it received a £550,000 grant to help end open-net salmon farming.
Its Off The Table campaign urges restaurants and consumers around the world to stop serving farmed salmon altogether. It works alongside vegan campaign groups, while the Green Britain Foundation promotes a vegan approach to food.
There is nothing wrong with choosing a vegan diet. But when organisations opposed to farming animals for food selectively use scientific research to tell the rest of us what we should eat, while campaigning to put thousands of Scots out of work, the public deserves to know the agenda behind the claims.
What the research actually tells us
New Marine Directorate research into the genetics of wild salmon is important and deserves to be taken seriously. Salmon farmers do not dispute that escaped farmed fish can breed with wild salmon.
But campaigners seized on the findings to claim salmon farming has permanently damaged wild salmon genetics. That certainty is not supported by the science.
Farm-bred salmon were deliberately stocked into some west coast rivers in the 1970s and 1980s. Wild salmon naturally move between river systems. There is no historic genetic record showing what Scotland’s wild salmon looked like before salmon farming and historic stocking.
The study is also a snapshot of fish sampled in 2021. It can detect genetic influence from farmed fish, but cannot tell us when it entered wild populations or whether it is increasing.
The claim of irreversible damage is particularly questionable. Recent Norwegian research examined one of the world’s most heavily affected wild salmon populations after decades of breeding with escaped farmed fish.
Researchers found no detectable impact from that genetic mixing on survival at sea, concluding that natural selection had removed poorly adapted individuals over time.
Escapes today are rare and tightly regulated. Our farmers work relentlessly to prevent them. And while campaigners spend money trying to close farms, salmon farmers are putting money into practical conservation, restoring rivers and supporting research to help wild salmon.
Wild salmon face more than one pressure
Meanwhile, the other pressures threatening wild salmon have not magically disappeared. Closing Scottish salmon farms will not tackle climate change, restore habitats or remove barriers to migration. Nor will it stop people eating salmon. It will simply replace Scottish production and Scottish jobs with imports.
WildFish and the Green Britain Foundation are free to campaign against our sector. But activism is not evidence, and campaigning slogans are not scientific conclusions.
Campaigners are entitled to their agenda. They are not entitled to rewrite the science to fit it.
A version of this article was originally published in The Times Scotland.