Småland fish do not play chess - January 12th 2023

Everyone has a respect for the finitude of life. This applies to the finitude of humans, of course, but also in many cases to animals. Animal welfare rules have been drawn up and are tightened over time. Many have

noted the discussion of stressed slaughter animals in cramped trucks being driven from one end of the country where they were born to another where the slaughterhouse is located. Chickens are hatched and live a few weeks before they are taken from the day and end up in an oven at one of our Swedish homes. As a consumer, you prefer not to know anything about it, instead you quickly scroll through the newspaper or lower the volume of the news broadcast.

Unfortunately, stress and pain experiences are not only typical of the rather intelligent animals such as pigs and cattle. The organization Djurens Rätt shows in presentations how even fish sense stress and pain. Unfortunately, being "dumb as a goldfish" does not apply. Fish have a memory, they have pain receptors and they are, in many cases, very long-lived. With scientific methods, it has been shown, for example, that a severed eel head can register changes such as changes in light hours after decapitation. And in experiments, researchers at, among others, SLU (Statens Lantbruksuniversitet) have illustrated how difficult it is to anesthetize fish sufficiently

before slaughter. No matter how carefully the staff work with their equipment, the fish sometimes wake up after only one or a few minutes and then have to suffer badly when they are then cut open and bled. In these cases, they meet a slow and painful death and then become fish cutlets on our dining tables.

Stunning is a bit like Ingemar Bergsman's world-famous film "The Seventh Seal". Delaying. In the film's key scene, the medieval knight Antonius Block, played by Max von Sydow, engages in a game of chess with death itself in order to, at least in time, postpone his inevitable demise. We have all seen them sitting by the rocky beach in Skåne with a game of chess between them.

The fish are not so wise that they can play chess with the food producer - they are killed in large numbers all over the world. In fish farming, the figure globally is approx. 51 – 167 billion fish individuals

per year and if wild-caught fish is included, that number increases a couple of times more!

Contrast this with Sweden's leading delicacy fish farm - Arctic Roe of Scandinavia AB in Småland's Strömsnäsbruk. The world's most exclusive foods, sturgeon or Black Caviar, are produced here. The Småland niche company's business concept is to be sustainable, local and act with the best interests of the fishermen and consumers in mind. How is that possible?

Well, at Arctic Roe no fish are killed, but the black roe grains are carefully milked out of each individual fish once every two years. And then the fish live on in peace for a decade or more with caviar harvested every two years. Furthermore, the sturgeon females in Småland do not live in a river or in a lake outdoors, but indoors in large tanks on the 3rd floor of an old paper mill. This provides a different business model that is characterized by sustainability, overview, individual follow-up and minimal footprint i

the environment.

Arctic Roe's sustainable business concept in a nutshell – TO MANUFACTURE THE WORLD'S MOST EXCLUSIVE FOODS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WORLD'S MOST DEMANDING REGULATIONS, THE SWEDISH.