Now that you know how caviar is made, you know that unfortunately the sturgeon is slaughtered in order to extract his roe.
Some caviar farms claim that they have find the solution to extract the caviar without killing the sturgeons, and therefore call it “ethical Caviar”. I have some reservations on whether or not it is really ethical, here’s why:
There are 2 methods to extract the eggs without killing the sturgeon:
Milking the sturgeon: the sturgeon is injected hormones to induce labor, and the farmer presses (milks) his belly to have to caviar ejected. For this method, the eggs need to be fertilized by a male sturgeon. This is not only stressful for the fish, but you also retrieve the injected hormones in the Caviar. For this method to be successful, the female sturgeon needs to be ready to spawn, therefore the roe is usually quite mushy.
C-Section: literally, the belly is cut open and the roe is extracted, then the fish is stitched up and put back in the water. This is painful for the fish, plus he will need to be given medication to resist the bacterias and the infections he will get in the water because of this wound.
Here are 2 videos that show the process to extract the roe with a no-kill methods. Beware, the images are pretty disturbing.
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As you can read, both of these methods are rather distressing for the sturgeons. One of the principal issues that I have with so-called Ethical Caviar, is that the main reason for a farm to apply this method is actually financial. Instead of farming a fish for years that will deliver caviar just once, the fish will produce caviar several times in his lifetime which may last decades, so it’s more profitable for the farmer.
I believe the question to ask ourselves is legitimate: is it better to kill the sturgeon (quickly, without stress), or to make it suffer and stress, so that it can generate more money for the farm?