Need a reason to ease up on the fish eating other than vegetarianism, being humane to animals, avoiding mercury poisoning, and the environment itself? If you love sea turtles, you might want to start eating fake fish, because it turns out that the fishing industry is causing death to many turtles every day.

Within the last 20 years, millions of sea turtles have been captured—usually accidentally—by unsustainable fishing practices such as trawling or using longlines or gillnet methods. If you thought dolphin bycatch during tuna hunting was bad, you’ll be very dismayed to know that sea turtles are commonly drowning by being kept in these nets for too long. Like other reptiles, they require oxygen—something they cannot get when trapped in a net.

They also die from swallowing dangerous hooks during these expeditions. The sharp hooks make them bleed to death, or cause them life-threatening injuries. This is not a pain-free way to die, either. According to Byron Wallace of Conservation Letters journal, “For sea turtles, fisheries bycatch is the most serious, acute threat to the persistence of their populations.”

Even more disturbing, a single pound of shrimp can yield 5 to 20 pounds of bycatch—including mammals, fish, turtles, invertebrates, coral, and other creatures. Is eating shrimp really worth all of that death and devastation? This effect is compared to clearing and bulldozing an entire forest—only in the ocean ecosystem. Estimates of turtle bycatch alone are almost 9 million within the last two decades.

But is the outrage over the turtle alone really in the right place? Like comedian Louis CK says, why is eating a dolphin worse than eating tuna? In this case, I would say that while the turtle’s demise here is catastrophic and disturbing, killing fish isn’t a stellar practice, either. We’re overfishing our resources out to the brink when what we really need to be doing is focusing on more sustainable, local food to help preserve our planet as well as our own diets. Yes, let’s save the turtles—but let’s also save the fish as well as ourselves.

Of course, there is a solution that doesn’t involve never eating fish again (though truly, you can get the same benefits from flaxseed and veggies, not to mention it does help the planet overall)—we could always enforce more sustainable fishing practices. Protected marine areas that would mandate a no-fishing rule would also help in places where turtles are known to roam.