Meet the ‘kayak vigilante' fighting the Scottish salmon farming industry

France 24

16 hours ago

Armed with a GoPro mounted on a telescopic pole, Staniford has been kayaking out to salmon farms for over six years. His mission: to film the circular cages holding tens of thousands of fish and expose what he calls "the horrors' of salmon farming.
He then shares the footage across his social media platforms:
People don't really know what's going on underneath the surface of the water, which is why it's very important for activists like me and others to film inside the cages and lift the lid to show the public what's really going on.
Normally I'd kayak out very early in the morning. (...) It's a question of going to the farm when there are no workers. We don't harass workers, we don't intimidate workers. We're trying to film when no one else is there.
We can have data on which farms have disease problems, which farms have deaths and mortalities, and target those farms.
Staniford said he filmed around 60 salmon farms, predominantly in Scotland, as well as in Ireland and Denmark's Faroe Islands.
'The more fish you cram in a closed confinement space, the more diseases you get'
Footage he captured during one of his excursions in September 2021 depicted dead fish floating on the surface, alongside others afflicted with raw flesh patches or swollen eyeballs.
Staniford blames overcrowding for these conditions:
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that if you cram animals at high densities, you're going to get diseases. You're going to get viruses, parasites. The more fish you cram in a closed confinement space, the more diseases you get. And this is a function of intensive production.
Among these parasites, Staniford says he has found sea lice, which feed on the skin and blood of salmon.
Mass deaths
In 2023, a record 17.4 million salmon died in Scottish farms, according to government data. The survival rate for juvenile salmon introduced two years earlier was 68.7%.
The spokesperson for the industry group Salmon Scotland, Andrew Watson, told the FRANCE 24 Observers team that Scottish salmon farms had succeeded in improving survival rates in recent years.
'Following a £1 billion investment since 2018, we increased survival rates in 2024 to a four-year high. The Scottish salmon sector has delivered the best survival rates on record in the first quarter of 2025, averaging 99.02 per cent, while managing sea lice levels to an historic low,' Watson said.
Initial 2024 data announced by the Scottish government in a January 17 report show no improvement in survival rates since 2018.
Incidents have occurred in recent months, too.
Videos released in June 2024 by activist group Animal Rising and filmed in northern Scotland appear to show fish suffering from burst eyeballs and skin wounds attributed to sea lice.
Over one million farmed salmon also died in October 2024 at a Scottish farm operated by Norway's Mowi, the world's biggest producer of farmed salmon. It was the most significant mass die-off of farmed salmon in Scotland in a decade.
While Mowi attributed the deaths to jellyfish blooms exacerbated by unprecedented sea temperature rises, campaigners have linked the incidents to the expansion of aquaculture farms and poor welfare.
Salmon-farming companies routinely dismiss footage from Staniford and other activists as "selective" and "isolated examples", often attributing damage to external factors.
Parliamentary inquiry
However, the Scottish authorities themselves are taking up the issue.
On January 17, 2025, the Rural Affairs and Islands (RAI) Committee of the Scottish Parliament published a report stemming from an inquiry conducted between April and December 2024. This followed the publication of a first inquiry in 2018.
'The Committee is disappointed by figures showing that mortality has not improved since the 2018 report,' the 2025 report stated. 'The Committee considers the current level of mortality to be too high in general across the sector, and it is very concerned to note the extremely high mortality rates at particular sites,' it also reads.
While acknowledging some industry improvements, the Committee wrote it was 'concerned that preventing high mortality events is not currently within the operational capability of industry' and called for 'far greater transparency in reporting mortality rates and disease outbreaks'.
The Committee also noted the impact of salmon farming on the global environment.
Staniford says the effects of salmon farming go far beyond the boundaries of the farms themselves:
The salmon farming industry discharges the waste effluent directly into the sea, which is sewage contamination. It also uses toxic chemicals. There are mass escapes from the farms that cause genetic contamination. And there's also the feed issue. Far from being a panacea for the world's food problem, we're actually overfishing. We're actually contributing to the crisis in world fisheries by fishing down the food chain.
Injunctions
The salmon farming industry takes a dim view of Staniford's activities.
Scotland is the world's third-largest producer of Atlantic salmon, after Chile and Norway, making salmon farming a significant industry in the country.
According to industry data, international sales of Scottish salmon reached £844 million (€1,000 million) in 2024, solidifying its standing as the U.K.'s largest food export. France remains the first export market, accounting for 55% of the total value of all Scottish salmon exports.
Staniford is currently facing legal action from three prominent Norwegian and Faroese salmon-farming companies.
The companies say his intrusions onto their facilities are unauthorised and present significant safety risks to both their personnel and fish stocks.
Two of these companies successfully obtained an injunction in 2024, legally barring him from accessing the walkways of their salmon pens.
Although Staniford indicated in November 2024 that he was considering retirement, he now appears more determined than ever to continue his fight:
I'd love to retire. I'm 53. I'm too old; I don't want to be kayaking out to farms, and I don't want to be leaving my children on weekends. But if nobody else will do it, I will do it.
In terms of retiring, if I'm banned from 75% of salmon farms in Scotland, then my job is done here. But maybe I'll just emigrate to Tasmania, Canada, Chile, or even France. They may be able to shut me down legally and have injunctions against me in Scotland. But maybe my retirement in Scotland will pave the way for me to move to another jurisdiction