Cooke Aquaculture

Cooke Aquaculture was shooting seals up until at least 2019. That year, the company was fined for failing to inform the authorities after it had shot multiple wild animals.⁸

Millions of fish die inside Cooke’s factory farm pens. In 2019, Cooke reported 2.5 million deaths, the highest of any fish farming company.⁹ Things have not improved since. In one month in 2025, the company recorded a mortality rate of 10.9%,¹⁰ while the 60,000 deaths across just two of the company’s Canadian sites in July 2025 show this is a systemic problem.¹¹

A 2019 investigation into Cooke Aquaculture in the US revealed horrific violence and abuse with workers slamming and stamping on fish and throwing them like basketballs. ¹²

At that same farm, the underfed fish were so hungry, it was reported that they mistook the pupils of other fishes’ eyes for food and ate them. Investigators also found spine deformities, extreme overcrowding, and animals being left to suffocate in piles of dead and dying fish.¹³

A 2026 US investigation into Cooke Aquaculture found workers clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhed on the ground and cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also found to be prevalent.¹⁴

In 2021, investigators filmed at Cooke Aquaculture farms in Scotland and found severe sea lice infestations and high levels of mortality, as well as fish crammed into barren underwater cages, where these natural migrators had nothing to do but swim in circles for up to two years. These animals suffer to such an extent that as many as a quarter die before they even make it to slaughter.¹⁵

Lice are a serious problem on fish farms as they eat the salmon alive, causing immense suffering. Between 1st February and 30th June 2025, every weekly lice count at one of Cooke’s farms was above the permitted threshold.¹⁶

In May 2022, Cooke Aquaculture submitted an application for a new fish farm in the Orkney Islands. Consultation documents revealed local residents showing fierce opposition, citing the discharging of faecal matter equivalent to almost 50,000 people every day, as well as chemical pollution, light and sound pollution, and the impact on their lives and on tourism.¹⁷ Despite this, the site was approved.¹⁸

The government keeps propping up Cooke Aquaculture’s business with generous handouts. Between 2010 and 2021, it was given £824,000 in taxpayers’ money, while it enriched itself to the tune of £413 million.¹⁹ Nice work if you can grift it.

In 2024, Cooke’s feed-production company, Northeast Nutrition, was given another grant of £224,000 towards storage tanks for oils.²⁰

2024 proved to be a lucrative year because the company was also handed £374,000 towards the cost of a waterborne feeding system trial.²¹ We taxpayers were certainly feeling generous in 2024.

And it's not just the Scots who are feeling generous. In 2023, Cooke’s Canadian business got a $4.7 million handout to help the company expand, all of which offers a valuable lesson to the rest of us... simply get the government to give your business money, then trouser the profits. Why didn’t we all think of that?

Cooke Aquaculture is a member of Salmon Scotland,²² a lobbying organisation which represents its members, and which is permitted to speak on behalf of Cooke.²³ Its Chief Executive, Tavish Scott is a former MSP. He has called the work of charities and campaigners who publicise the enormous problems with salmon farming “anti-democratic”²⁴ and even threatened to sue an MSP for asking questions about the problems caused by the industry.²⁵ Scott has been investigated for allegedly breaching lobbying rules, including failing to register his activities, and has been described as a “regular visitor” to Holyrood where he still holds a parliamentary access pass.²⁶

There is quite a history of Cooke Aquaculture polluting waters so grab yourself a cup of tea and make yourself comfy. We’ll start with Kelly Cove Salmon, a division of Cooke Aquaculture in Canada, which pleaded guilty to two charges relating to illegally discharging toxic chemicals into the water. Hundreds of lobsters died as a result.²⁷

The company was fined $332,000 in 2017 after a pen collapsed and 250,000 salmon were released into waters containing endangered pacific salmon.²⁸ To settle the lawsuit that followed, the company paid $2.75 million in legal fees and to fund restoration projects.²⁹

In 2017, the company was also fined $8,000 for polluting waters in the US when it continued pressure washing its dirty equipment, discharging the waste into Puget Sound.³⁰

In 2018, Cooke Aquaculture in Scotland was found to be in breach of environmental regulations after discharging “effluent from blood water tanks” down a bank and into the sea.³¹ Delightful.

Then, between 2023 and 2025, Cooke Aquaculture Scotland was found to have breached environmental rules eight times.³² (“Hold my beer-battered fish”, says salmon factory-farmer, Mowi, which even managed to surpass this shocking rate.)

In Chile, Cooke Aquaculture was sanctioned in 2025 after eight environmental infractions, with the court ordering the closure of two sites.³³ (That ruling was later overturned in court but the arguments about the pollution of Chile’s water by salmon farming corporations rages on.)

People are sick of this company’s pollution. In 2025, campaigners in the US filed a lawsuit against Cooke, stating: “Cooke Aquaculture USA, Inc. harms the marine environment by growing millions of salmon in hundreds of cages along Maine’s coast. Waste from the densely packed salmon forms a thick layer of toxic sediment on the ocean floor. The salmon foster disease and harbor parasites, and they escape and interbreed with endangered wild salmon. In addition, Cooke discharges trash into Maine’s waters.”³⁴ We wish them luck.

And yet, in June 2026, the company got the go-ahead to build yet another farm with ten more pens full of sea-lice-infested salmon in Shetland. What has a company got to do to get sanctioned?³⁵

Research has revealed high levels of dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and organochlorine pesticides in farmed salmon, which could be a risk to human health. As far back as 2005, scientists said that carcinogenic chemicals in European farmed salmon could pose “elevated cancer and non-cancer health risks when consumed at modest rates”.³⁶

Cooke Aquaculture USA was fined for workplace health and safety violations in 2012, 2014, twice in 2016, and again in 2019.³⁷