For the millions of fish and for the wider public interest in what people eat, I urgently need to raise money to fight back and defend cases brought against me in Scotland’s local Sheriff Courts in Oban and Dunoon by the salmon farming giants Mowi, Norskott Havbruk (Scottish Sea Farms) and Bakkafrost.  An appeal against Mowi’s legal action will be heard in the Sheriff Appeal Court in Edinburgh on 1 February 2024. 

Your money will go directly into a fighting fund to pay my legal team who have been working without payment for over two years.  

Please help stop Norwegian-owned companies using the Scottish courts to shut down secret filming at salmon farms across Scotland.  Take a look at the horrors uncovered in 2023 and you can see why salmon farming companies are desperate to stop the public from seeing the ugly truth about Scottish salmon:

The battle is unequal.  Put simply, the resources of these multinationals are limitless; mine are tiny.  Your generous support is urgently needed to pay Counsel and Solicitors to defend the cases.

Faced with a barrage of negative media coverage, Norwegian giants Mowi and Norskott Havbruk (Scottish Sea Farms), and Faroese/Norwegian giant Bakkafrost - the three largest salmon farming companies in Scotland - want to stop all covert filming inside their fish cages as well as surveillance via drones.  They have all launched legal actions against me seeking to establish exclusion zones and no-fly zones around dozens of their salmon farms in Scottish territorial waters.

Mowi, Norskott Havbruk (Scottish Sea Farms) and Bakkafrost are trying to establish a law of trespass in Scotland for the first time and erode age-old public rights of access and navigation on open water.  Uniquely in the UK, Scotland has a right to take responsible access to all land and waters, save where the law expressly excludes it.   

Please help me stop these salmon giants from trying to diminish public rights on land (Norskott Havbruk and Bakkafrost are seeking to fence off land bases as well as sea sites) and in the public waters around the Scottish coast.  I have a very committed team of lawyers who are generously moving mountains to try to help these efforts.

If these foreign-owned companies win permanent interdicts (injunctions) against public access it will severely limit public scrutiny of the welfare and environmental conditions in which salmon are being farmed.   Interdicts against me will establish a precedent for restraining other coastal users such as fishermen, kayakers, swimmers, tourism operators, wind surfers, yacht people and other boat users from crossing parts of the sea. The salmon farming giants are also, chillingly, seeking to prevent anyone I might otherwise help, instruct or encourage from undertaking covert surveillance.  

You may have read about 'zombie' salmon in The Sunday Mail or watched X-rated videos published by Newsweek, MailOnline, The Express, The Sun or The Mirror. 

This is a real life David vs. Goliath fight – or as The Herald reported in December 2023: “David vs. three Goliaths”.  The litigants are massively profitable - Mowi exceeded €1billion in operating profit in 2022.  Mowi’s legal action was designated as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) in May 2023 and I am speaking at the Scottish Anti-SLAPP summit in Glasgow in February 2024 to raise public awareness of the threats posed by salmon farming companies abusing the law.  Here is a video of a talk I gave in November 2023 at the UK Anti-SLAPP conference in London:

None of your donations go to me – they go directly to pay my KC John Campbell, advocate Simon Crabb and solicitor Jamie Whittle of R&R Urquhart.  I am indebted to their support to get this far but we need to see it through. 

If you've watched the film ‘Supersize Me’ or read the books ‘McLibel’ and ‘Buying Silence’ you'll know how massive corporations work so hard to stifle and silence public criticism.   I firmly believe that these lawsuits have fundamentally been brought to protect these companies from reputational damage rather than being to ensure the health and safety of their operations.  Salmon farmers are marketing their 'RSPCA Assured', ASC-certified and 'organic' salmon in supermarkets as “responsibly farmed”.  Yet all of the evidence – uncovered via covert surveillance - in my view points to greenwashing. 

Your financial support will help expose the disease-ridden conditions inside 21st century salmon farms and help stop these industrial giants from blocking access to Scottish waters and land.  Public scrutiny is vital in ground-truthing the greenwashing of salmon farming not just in Scotland but all over the world.  99% of salmon production in Scotland is controlled or owned by six foreign multinationals, predominantly from Norway.  

Right now, there are three cases to fight - Mowi Scotland, Scottish Sea Farms (Norskott Havbruk) and Bakkafrost Scotland.  I am trying to raise £25,000 to pay my legal team to defend the SLAPPs and work through any appeals in the short term, and will need to raise more to sustain a defence of these actions.

All donations are much appreciated and will contribute to my legal fees. No litigation is affordable these days, never mind cheap.  All costs and donations will be transparently audited.  

About me

I am an award-winning campaigner - dubbed the 'Kayak Vigilante' by The Times - who has lifted the lid on welfare abuse since 2018 when I started covert surveillance inside salmon farms across Scotland. 

You may have seen me climbing up a skip full of diseased Mowi salmon in Netflix's 'Seaspiracy' or exposing Bakkafrost’s salmon in the Kate Winslet-narrated film 'Eating Our Way to Extinction'.  I feature in the new Netflix show ‘You Are What You Eat’ and Paramount’s ‘The Changemakers’ – both launched on 1 January 2024 – alongside horrific footage shot inside salmon farms operated by Norskott Havbruk (Scottish Sea Farms).

You can find out more via my website and blog.  Follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Vimeo.  Big thanks and best fishes!