Fish Face Seafood Blog | News | Organisation attempts to debunk trawling myths

Last updated: 3 July, 2024 @ 17:37

Let’s be honest, the word ‘trawling’ doesn’t have too many favourable connotations. Indeed, trawling has become associated with over-fishing, the destruction of the environment and bad practices.

However, the Shetland Fishermen’s Association (SFA) is attempting to debunk some of the ‘myths’ surrounding the fishing industry and its practices.

In its recently released paper, Fishy Falsehoods – Trawling Destroys the Seabed, the SFA says that those who claim that trawling destroys the seabed are ‘deliberately using an emotive and exaggerated terms to mislead the public and to attract public sympathy and support’.

‘This is nonsense’

Many people envisage trawling as towing heavy weights across the seabed, catching and destroying everything that the net comes into contact with. However, the SFA says that this simply isn’t true.

‘Proponents of bans on trawling love to make our flesh creep with emotional descriptions of heavy weights being dragged across the seabed, ploughing up the bottom and destroying everything in its path,’ the paper says.

‘This is nonsense: towing heavy weights across the seabed is no more sensible than towing one behind your car.’

SFA: ‘Does farming destroy the land?’

The SFA also asks why some farming practices do not come under the same level of scrutiny as trawling.

It says that ploughing and harrowing causes ‘far greater disturbance to the land than trawling does to the seabed… and few people would suggest that farmers are destroying the land or that ploughing should be banned’.