Meat vs. fish

On several occaisons in the last few days I have come across people who say they don't eat meat for ethical and environmental reasons, but then go on to say that they eat fish.

I'm puzzled by that. My personal definition of "meat" is animal flesh. Isn't a fish an animal? It isn't a vegetable or a mineral!

It's also my personal opinion that the majority of commercial fishing is, at best, less sustainable than farming land animals. In particular, Japanese tuna boats are massive, and they recently admitted to catching up to three times more than their allowed quote of southern bluefin tuna for the last 20 years. The UN has classified over two-thirds of the world's fishing areas as fully- or over-exploited.

I also have serious concerns about the environmental impact of fish farming, particularly in the open ocean. I really like the concept of closed-loop aquaponics systems, and aquaculture in Australia is regulated by licensing, which avoids many of the problems experienced overseas, but my problems with fish farming are:
* Most ocean-farmed fish require a huge amount of (wild) fish protein to provide feed for the farmed fish (which to my mind, defeats the purpose) - for example it takes around 3-5 kilos of other fish protein to produce 1 kilo of farmed salmon. In addition, farmed salmon has a much paler flesh than wild salmon, so they add artifical colouring to the food to make it pinker.
* The pollution from large numbers of confined fish is amazing - for example, a farm of 200,000 fish produces the same amount of waste as a 600,000 person city... and there's no sewerage system.
* Confining the fish stresses them, which can lead to a proliferation of diseases that may be spread to the wild fish populations. In Australia this hasn't been as big an issue as overseas, but in order to combat disease, many farms routinely use preventative antibiotics, pesticides, and fungicides as well as hormones. Farmed salmon are fed more antibiotics than any other farmed animal in the world.
* Most fish species are genetically modified to grow faster and bigger than wild species.
* Escaped fish compete with wild fish for resources and may interbreed, weakening the gene pool of the wild population. For example there was an escape of about 25,000 fish from a farm in Tasmania in early 2005.
* Wild fish and mammals can become caught in the nets surrounding the fish and drown. These nets are sometimes coated with copper and other toxic chemicals in order to prevent barnacles etc growing on them, and these chemicals leach into the environment.
* Canned fish products contain preservatives including sulphur dioxide and potassium sulphites, both implicated as asthma triggers.

In-land aquaculture has it own problems as well, particularly in dealing with pollution from waste and the use of chemicals in their diet, and they still require wild-caught fish protein. There is one organic fish farm in Australia that I know of, Organic Fish Australia, that farms silver perch, but it isn't widely available yet unfortunately.

So I'm still very puzzled as to why anyone would feel it's OK to eat fish but not meat (unless it's fish they caught themselves)? Anyway, that's my rant for the day :-)