WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS FOOTAGE OF FISH BEING KILLED
Join us for another fun day at the farm as Jayson teaches us how to catch and dispatch fish. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in sustainable farming and learning how their food goes from farm to plate.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Catching Tilapia
2:22 How to Dispatch Fish
3:07 Dispatching Tilapia
SLIDES FROM VIDEO:
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Another fun day at the farm. Mm-Hmm.
Hey there, my name is Jayson. I’m gonna teach you how to catch and dispatch a fish. We want to be as humane as we possibly can. Lucky day! Slippery is a fish! Ow those spines on top, man! Come on buddy.
I thought you had teflon hands.
No, they’re not immuned to spikes. Oh, that’s a good one. Yeah, that’s a good size. That’s the size we want. The way that tilapia filets are right behind here, there’s like a “V”, it’s like a cartilage spine, whereas most fish you could just filet the whole thing right off. But because these are actual spiny fish, you just heard me complaining about getting stabbed. You kind of, when you look at it almost looks like the Star Trek logo. You kind of like, there’s a little “V” on the bottom part of it, so we have to work around that. So the bigger the fish, the better because these are already pretty thin filets. This is a little too small. Like if you want to harvest an animal and you’re not hungry, I would let this one go. We want it to be, about another four inches or so. You want ’em at least a foot, 11 inches to a foot before you harvest a meaningful amount of filets. I mean, a foot fish will give you two decent size enough for maybe two people. So if we’re gonna go through the work, we don’t want to just get fish sticks. We want to get the whole fish dinner. And when you look at the filet, even though you think it’s big, you’re cutting right here. You’re cutting right here. So that’s the size of your filet. So that’s why we say we want ’em at least 12 inches.
So sometimes patience is all you can have. You know, like we’re just gonna wait for these fish to get a little bigger or figure out how we can make them bigger in this pond. We’ve got a couple of pretty good ones, so we’ll definitely filet those up. Oh, dude, that’s what we’re looking for right there. Oh, yeah. That’s what we’re looking for. The elusive talapia. All right, lemme get outta here. I knew it.
Okay. So this is the fastest way to dispatch a fish. We want to make sure it’s like, we’ll do it as quick as possible. I’m gonna stop talking. So with these, you want to stunt ’em right behind the eyes, right on the top of their head. And then we’re gonna go in behind the gill and cut the spinal cord just to make sure they’re, they’re done. So we gotta smack this guy pretty good. Now you can see, it stopped moving. So I knocked him out. We’re gonna go right in behind, right in here. And think of where the spinal column is. It’s right there. So we’re just gonna pretty gross. Sorry, first fish. All right, well there’s one.
So that’s our biggest guy right there. Gotta really hold him tight. And I’m gonna bonk him. Good. That’ll stunt him. Now we can get in there, cut the spinal cord. And that is about the fastest way to dispatch a fish right there. Whole thing took about 15 seconds. There’s guys that could do it way faster than I can. 10 seconds, five seconds. But that’s about it. I know it looks kind of gruesome. This is part of the process. This is what you guys don’t see in the grocery store. If you’re afraid of blood or, you know, whatever it is. This is where your food comes from. This is natural. This is how it works. It’s how we’ve been doing it for gillions of years. And you’re like, oh, well we don’t have to anymore. It’s like, well, we might have to. So this is a skill you should learn.
