Mad Fish

Hard on the heels of the news of a Mad Cow discovered in the States was my experience last week. Imagine my dismay when I saw the sign at the Sea Food restaurant saying that their product was guaranteed not to have Mad Fish Disease. “Mad Fish?” I asked my wife.

I have seen a few really angry fish in my days of casting a line. Nothing disturbs a large northern pike like a red and white spoon splashed right in front of him during his afternoon siesta. Or dragging a jointed pikie past him when he is out for a little morning exercise. A gold #2 Mepps spinner does the same.

I have even met a few smallmouth bass that get mightily miffed when you tease them with a hula popper. On some days they will attack just about anything you throw their way. But Mad Fish? Not really.

My goldfish will give me a glassy stare when I arrive late with their food, but I cannot say that they look mad. So I was at somewhat surprised to learn that some little-known scientist announced that the cod living just off the Grand Banks were mad. They had Mad Fish Disease.

We were taught as children that eating fish was good for you. Called ‘brain’ food, fish supposedly helped the neurons or synapses or gray matter develop. I guess I didn’t eat enough fish when I was young. Ate a lot of carrots too, and still I ended up wearing eye glasses.

Hard on the heels of the Mad Cod announcement was a news release that Mad Fish Disease (MFD) had been found in swordfish and marlin. Within days the same scientist claimed that early studies indicated that MFD was suspected in red roughy and Chilean sea bass.

Using the same clinical methodology, a scientist in Japan supposedly found traces of MFD in mahi mahi and bottlenose dolphins. In Norway, a group is looking at whales, even though they are not fish, in case MFD is carried in those leviathans of the deep that are caught ‘for scientific purposes’.

I immediately began to worry about MFD disease in sardines. You see, I like nothing better than a sardine sandwich – sunflower seed bread, real butter, garnished with a little Dijon mustard, washed down with a nice light lager – ah! My wife says sardines are not fish. They may smell like fish, look like fish, but they are not, in her book, fish to eat.

MFD is a very serious matter. Consumption of infected fish points to deterioration of the brain. Not a deadly disease of the bovine nature, but a lessening of the ability to reason in adults over a certain age. It apparently affects that part of the brain that causes women to buy things they don’t need on sale while men refuse to buy an item until the sale is over and the price is back to a normal markup. I could see where this might be true in our household.

However, the theory of MFD was quickly debunked when reporters discovered that the whole thing was a ploy by environmentalists to save the world’s rapidly declining fish stocks. The foreign seiners and factory boats on our East Coast likely brought this on. The fish huggers saw what Mad Cow Disease did to the Canadian beef industry and thought to apply the same strategy to the fish industry.

We should have sympathy for any effort to save the natural fish stocks. The rapidly growing world population is devouring our resources faster than they are replenished by nature. Fish are one of the main resources for poorer nations and as we plunder the seas, we will eventually starve millions of people.

The answer may lay in commercial fish farms or aquaculture. But one thing is bothering me. What are they feeding these farm fish that we will eat? Not, I hope the same things they fed those mad cows. BSE has been traced to the practice of feeding cattle ground protein – from slaughtered cattle – as a means of quickly adding weight to cattle. What are they feeding pigs, sheep, chickens and turkeys?

My pond fish seem to be happy with their pellets of solient brown, but I don’t plan on eating my goldfish. Whatever they feed farm fish, I hope it is something the fish eat naturally because I don’t want any Mad Fish in my sandwiches.