Taking part in the campaign

Every individual, every organization is invited to take part in the World Day for the End of Fishing and Fish Farming by organizing events – online as well! All contributions are important and appreciated.

Take action

• Organize a public event and get media coverage: a happening, a vigil, a Save square, a march; a screening, an exhibition, a conference or even a symposium; set up a stand, a press table; hand out leaflets, put up posters in your city, etc. You can find a variety of examples by looking at the videos and pictures from previous editions.

  • For such actions, media coverage can make a big difference: if one or two media outlets are talking about it, your message will have a much wider reach, so consider sending out press releases! 

  • In order to spread the word and inspire new activists, it’s also important to take pictures, regardless of the scope of your event. Show the setting of your action – posters, banners, costumes – and in addition to sharing on social media, don’t forget to send your best footage and images to info@end-of-fishing.org so we can add them to our albums and posts for global press coverage.

  • Announce the action on social media beforehand, and share it on Connect For Animals' online calendar to make sure other advocates are informed! 

  • Finally, to assess what counterfactual impact your event may have, some informal metrics can be useful, such as: counting the number of activists that participate and assessing whether they seem to have been motivated or not by the action, tracking your interactions with passersby by noting both the initial sentiment (positive or negative) and their final consideration for aquatic animals’ interests, and of course, judging the tone of the media articles reporting on the event.

• Create an artwork on aquatic animals, whether you are a singer, musician, sculptor, illustrator, painter, graphic artist, video maker, choreographer, dancer, cook, YouTuber, actor, comedian, etc., and promote it online or in local media. You can find examples on our Artists for aquatic animals page. Don’t forget to look at the metrics to assess how many individuals were reached by your art and how they reacted.

• Publicize this initiative, by spreading the word on social media, in vegetarian and vegan circles, among animal rights activists, in the environmental movement, etc.; by writing a press release for the media explaining that your organization supports this World Day and why it matters (this is one way of publicizing it: journalists may want to interview you or the organizing team).

• Look for and share awareness-raising and educative content on social media: videos, photos, articles, websites, etc. Use hashtags like  #WoDEF and #EndFishing to spread the word. Observe what types of engagement and reactions different approaches to this topic garner (number of likes, tone of the comments…) in order to get a better idea of what kind of posts effectively improve people’s attitudes toward sentient aquatic animals.

• Initiate cultural campaigns to raise awareness of aquatic animals and the harms that are inflicted upon them. For example, we have an exhibition on this topic, which you can contact us about at info@end-of-fishing.org if you are interested. You can see some examples of the posters on our Fishing and fish farming, Sentient Aquatic Animals, and Speciesism pages. If you organize this kind of event, sharing a survey at the end to see how participants were impacted can be very instructive.

• Launch a pressure campaign against a specific form of exploitation: against transporting and keeping live lobsters or crabs for months to cook them later; against live-bait fishing; against new octopus farms; against recreational fishing; against shrimp eating, etc. Some of these campaigns, when run well, can lead to partial or total success, and in all cases, they help to raise public and media awareness of the issue of aquatic animals, or even invertebrates. Campaigns can be local (boycotting particular shops, putting pressure on town councils, etc.) or national (putting pressure on supermarkets, on commercial chains, on legislators, on political parties, etc.). If you organize such a campaign, we would be very interested in being informed of its outcome, even long after the official date of the WoDEF!

• Aim to include aquatic animals in your year-round advocacy. Underline their sentience and discuss their exploitation when it is pertinent, research the fishing and aquaculture industries in your country to be able to denounce the harms that they cause to aquatic animals, and do not exclude them from the estimates of animals exploited by humans or killed for food every year.

• Consider the words you choose: although the media sometimes mentions "animal-rights activists", notions such as speciesism and sentience are still largely unknown. When it comes to aquatic animals in particular, it's important to use language:

  • that emphasizes their individuality (“stop exploiting and killing aquatic animals”), while avoiding framings that amalgamate these animals and their environment (eg. “protect our oceans”), place them on the same level as plants (eg. “protect sea life”), or refer to them as objects (eg. “stop depleting fishery resources”);

  • which includes freshwater fishes, crustaceans and cephalopods: "aquatic animals” is more inclusive than "marine animals", and "aquaculture farms” covers crustacean farming, unlike "fish farms".

• Help us financially: La Question aquatique, an organization based in France, is in charge of this worldwide campaign (administration of the website, production of media for activists such as leaflets and exhibitions, communication with other organizations). Any financial help is useful. We would like to have a full-time employee to strengthen the campaign year-round.

• Invest time in the campaign: spreading the word on social media, helping us in translations, office work, etc. All volunteer work is welcome!

• Keep in touch: while there are only a handful of volunteers working on the campaign, we love hearing from you! It is important that we know what you are planning, have a link to your events and website, know how your plans are developing and how we can help you. Afterwards, remember to fill in the form we’ll send you to give us a brief account of how your event went, and of course, please share your videos and pictures with us!

Announce an action!

Contact us : info@end-of-fishing.org