Hi, this is Nghia again, from Vietnam, one of the Open Philanthropy funded students. This is a follow-up to my last post, in which I’ll explain more about my project, titled “Fish Welfare in Vietnamese Markets Live-Holding Systems: A Health and Cost-Benefit Analysis.”

The previous post discussed the project details and its amendments, so I will continue here with the process and the primary results, i.e., what I found during and after 3 months of fieldwork in Vietnam.

For the data collection, I spent about 1.5 months in the South – Long Xuyen City, An Giang, and about 1 month in the North – Ha Noi City. I started in the South, where there were some difficulties, and many mitigations had been made to adapt to the actual situation. We had to change from one shark catfish species (Pangasius hypophthalmus) to another (P. conchophilus). We also decided to survey as many vendors as possible for the seller’s maintenance practices and cost-benefit analysis.

For the fish health analysis, I went to the markets, bought the fish, and asked the seller to stun and kill the fish. Pictures of individual fish, including the whole body, and close-ups of fins, gills, mouth, eyes, scales and skin, were taken and analysed by 1 person (me) to reduce the bias from multiple people. We could not mitigate some difficulties in this part: uncooperative vendors, especially in the wholesale markets. Therefore, data for wholesale markets of common carp and tilapia in the north were unobtainable. In the South, we could only get the data from 2 vendors for tilapia and 1 vendor for catfish.

There is no grading for the gills in the Operational Welfare Indicator (OWI) for pangasius (Compassion in World Farming). Yet, the market visit showed that the gills of catfish were not good. In some cases, we can see the gills were pale and split (see picture). Therefore, we chose to integrate the grading of gills from tilapia to catfish to better understand welfare scores.

The OWIs we used in this study did not cover the behaviour of the animal (Compassion in World Farming; Pedrazzani et al., 2020; Padrazzani et al., 2022), which is one of the freedoms of animal welfare (FAWC, 1993). Therefore, we also collect data on the normal and abnormal behaviour of the animal. One of the frequent observations was the belly-up catfish. We found it in most of the vendors visited in the South (Long Xuyen City, An Giang), in different species (P. conchophilus, P. krempfi, P. bocoruti, see pictures). By coincidence when I was scouring my TikTok recently, I found the belly-up catfish in one of the videos filmed in Dong Thap Province (Ranh-Thi via TikTok, 2024). We had included more information on the fish health aspect of this project, yet some of the grading criteria of the original OWIs were not used. For example, the organs that were usually affected (degraded) in tilapia are eyes, skin and scales, and gills; for catfish are skin, gills, and fins, which are also applied for common carp.

For the interviews, we tried to ask as many vendors as possible. In the South, many vendors were selling the same kind of fish in the same market, and they would sit close to each other. On the other hand, in the North, usually, there was only one fish vendor per market. Therefore, the total number of vendors interviewed in the South was larger than in the North. The survey contains 4 question sections, i.e., general questions, water management, fish management, and cost-benefit, and 1 section for observation of the live-holding systems.

Right now, I am in the process of analysing my data and writing the final manuscript. As well as giving the potential solutions for the aquaculture industry’s welfare in Vietnam, in the final stage of the animal. However, to say that we have to kill fish (humanely) at harvesting and before transportation to sell is an impossible idea for now because Vietnamese people still prefer to see fish alive before purchase. Already dead fish are sold at a much lower price (considered lower quality).

Thank you for still reading ‘'til this line. If there are any questions or you want to discuss the topic or any fish and fish-welfare-related topics, I am happy to discuss them through my email at ndp00009@students.stir.ac.uk.