Featured Image Credit: u/jellylemonshake/Reddit
Topics: Animals, Food and Drink, Reddit, Social Media, Viral, Animal Cruelty, Vegan
Poppy Bilderbeck
Topics: Animals, Food and Drink, Reddit, Social Media, Viral, Animal Cruelty, Vegan
A video revealing one method of how caviar is harvested has left social media users feeling 'uncomfortable'.
There's an argument for if you couldn't kill it yourself, you shouldn't be eating it and well, if you take that into consideration after seeing how caviar is harvested, most of us definitely wouldn't be reaching for a jar of the fish eggs anytime soon.
Vegetarians and vegans, avert your eyes:
Advert
Various videos have emerged online revealing how caviar is harvested and, putting it lightly, it's hard not to throw up while watching them.
A video shared to Reddit thread r/interestingasf**k by a user called u/jellylemonshake shows the underbelly of a sturgeon fish with a little hole and a metal instrument opening it up, eggs pouring out of the gap into a bucket of dark caviar below as a hand moves up and down the fish's body.
The caption to the video reads: "Beluga Caviar, 1kg of which is sold for $7.500, is obtained by milking the sturgeon."
Indeed, Caviar Star - yes, that is actually the name of a website - explains caviar can be harvested in a variety of ways, but there are two which are most common.
The 'classic harvesting method' is when the fish is killed, but the 'no-kill' harvesting method - shown in the Reddit video - sees the fish opened up and the roe extracted before the fish is then popped back in the sea.
The eggs are either extracted by 'c-section method' - 'a small incision' made and the eggs 'carefully scooped out' or by 'vivace method' an incision made before a 'fish-milking technique' takes place - as seen in the Reddit video below.
This process can also end up seeing hormone therapy used to 'alter fish breeding reproduction techniques' to make it easier to collect the eggs
One user said: "'And what do you do for a living?'"
"I'm a fish w*nker," another replied.
A third wrote: "This makes me uncomfortable."
"Wait so they didn’t kill the fish. Which implies they just stuck a metal thing up it’s fishussy and are squirting the eggs out that way..? ….euhg," a fourth added.
A fifth said: "This is actually kind of sick that we’re doing this as humans."
"Maybe we don't need to do this then," a sixth suggested.
And a final resolved: "I'm not a vegetarian by any means, I do however always think about how id feel if aliens came down and did to us what we do to life on this planet."
So, what do you think?