It's no secret that meat comes to us through a process of savage cruelty. For those who care to look, the atrocities inflicted on cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other such creatures are well documented. But one product that often escapes notice is caviar.
True, people consume a lot more hamburgers than fish eggs, but caviar can be found in the refrigerated section of many grocery stores, not to mention every one of the gourmet and “world food” stores that dot most cities. Like fast food joints, though, they're not anxious for us to know how their product got to their shelves.
If you thought that sturgeon nicely laid their eggs somewhere for divers to harmlessly scoop up, forget it. Instead, imagine grabbing a pregnant woman off the street, pimpslapping her, slicing her belly open, ripping out her fetus, then leaving her to slowly die of her injuries and blood loss. That's the human analogy to caviar.
In his investigation of the seedy, greedy worldwide caviar industry, Simon Cooper gives an eyewitness account of a poacher in the Caspian Sea harvesting eggs from the “thick, writhing carpet” of sturgeon he's caught:
The poacher selects a fat female. She is about four feet long and swollen with eggs. He hits her hard with a plank of wood — not hard enough to kill, but enough to stun. Blood trickles from her eyeballs, mouth, and gills. Quickly, the poacher rolls her over, slits open her belly, reaches inside, and carefully extracts a plump, gray-black sac about the size of a pillow. He puts the egg sac into a large plastic bucket and throws the eviscerated fish on the ground, where she flaps and thrashes, her abdomen gaping, until she succumbs and dies.