The Last Days of the Salmon

[Sushihunter]

http://pushback.com/issues/salmon/

The Last Days of the Salmon

As someone who enjoys fishing greatly (and in particular, the challenge of catching salmon outside the Golden Gate), I share Bill Wattenburg’s disgust at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife killing salmon returning upriver just because they were born in a hatchery. It is utterly amazing that the government can get away with killing, by the tens of thousands, a fish they claim belongs on the endangered species list.

The issue came to our attention when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on what Oregon banker Ronald Yechout stumbled upon—thousands of salmon returning upstream to spawn were being beaten to death with baseball bats. He videotaped the otherworldly scene and gave the videotape to all the local TV stations and newspapers, but only the WSJ and one local paper have run significant stories on the slaughter. The killing of 6,000 (and more) salmon is part of an effort to shut the Fall Creek Hatchery over the past several years.

The best introduction to the issues at the moment consists of the following two clips from Bill Wattenburg’s radio show the night he first discussed the topic:

Additional information can be found at the following links:

Court Strikes down Federal Agency’s Use of “Politicized” Science, and rules that hatchery-spawned salmon are biologically indistinguishable from naturally spawned, so-called “wild” salmon.
Oregon Lawmakers Decry Salmon Killings
A Sampling of Salmon Recovery Viewpoints
The Oregonian’s latest story on Ronald Yechout
Letter from the National Marine Fisheries Service discussing how terns and cormorants are killing 10 million or more young salmon on their way to the ocean.
Terns pose yet another threat to young salmon (an article in the Oregonian discussing the overpopulation of terns eating tons of migrating salmon.

February 7, 2000 Wall Street Journal article
New Danger To Endangered Species Act Implementation for Oregon Coho (an article by Joel Gallob, who writes for the Newport News-Times)
Alsea Valley Alliance and Mark Sehl vs. Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, et al.
(full text of a lawsuit filed to stop further killing of the Coho salmon in Oregon)
Legislative Committee Looks Into State Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Hatchery Coho Salmon Program [PacificLegal removed the page]

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Media Clips
The RealMedia clips below will start to play after the entire clip has been downloaded. I am working on converting these to YouTube videos.

Video of salmon being killed
Bill Wattenburg describes how and why Oregon is killing salmon.
A caller on Wattenburg’s radio show (Scott from San Jose) describes his views on the killing of salmon by the state of Oregon.
Crocker Mountain Broadside—information about the poisoning of Davis Lake and other related issues.
.
Check the link for links to video and other supporting info:

http://pushback.com/issues/salmon/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raohUS_e_K4

Jim's Fishing Charters
www.JimsFishing.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/Sushihunter250

 

[highlights]

[:0]

The guys who came up with that idea were about as sharp as some of the people working for DFO. The predation issue was amazing. Deal with the seals by ridding the stream of salmon. Are you F#$%'n serious.

Morons. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[highlights]

Releasing that wild fish back to the river after it had been labotomized actually made me nauseated.[xx(]

 

[Tasteless]

Not sure why this hasn't been more comments regarding this post, it actually frustrated me enough to make an account and post, i've been a long time lurker here and use other similar forums.

Anyways back on topic.

1) What I do not understand first and foremost is why in that interview in the court hearing or whatever was going on why fisherman were not able to keep any of these hatchery coho, when clearly they were going to go to waste and be killed by some dummy with a stick at the hatchery anyways. The main point of hatchery fish is a put and take fishery especially if they are so worried about hatch jobs spawning with wild fish. But in the video obviously they don't care either because they were killing wild fish and throwing them back in the river? I don't understand for the life of me.

2) Who was participating in this coho/chinook cull at the hatchery itself? Don't these nimrods understand that without salmon in the river there is no point of the hatchery thus they lose their jobs or part of their job and thus potential money in their pockets?

3) What was the point of even putting a hatchery on the river if they were just going to kill everything that showed up back there year after year? There is no proof in the video that there is lack of funding or support to the hatchery hell they had a whole team there just waiting to start frying some fish in the electrical pool and cut their heads off.

I just don't understand people anymore and why people do what they do, who was that idiot trying to defend the hatchery staff or the oregon fishery and wildlife employee's that were doing what they were in the video he needs to be smacked on the head a couple of times with that bat. I would've lost it if I was one of the people asking the questions, I know it seemed like that one guy was thinking "WHAT THE HELL" everytime he was talking.

That would be like when we have low returns here at the robertson creek hatchery that we kill off every single coho and steelhead that come up the river because we don't want clones with the wild stock. Too much hassle to sort threw the clipped to non-clipped, lets just kill them all. Just like that dolt that said very arrogantly "that's why they are clipped" and walked away.

Saddens me to see that there are coho at the bottom of that weir at a ghost town of a hatchery at the end of october that will just sit there and swim until they are tomatoes threw and threw and die.

Oregon [V]

I really hope something has changed since this video was released to the public. I almost lost it when I was watching that dummy pick the coho out of that net and bonk them one by one and left them I know they were not being bonked for egg take that's for sure what a waste of a resource hatchery or not.

/rant

 

[highlights]

I'm with you. I cannot beleive there have not been more posts to this thread. I have been watching for just over a week now.

I know I was dumbfounded by the whole thing. Very disturbing.

Thats 136 people that had nothing to say about it. Weird , because you just don't see that type of stupidity everyday. Well maybe we do , but we all usually have something to say about it.

 

[Charlie]

quote:Originally posted by Tasteless

Not sure why this hasn't been more comments regarding this post, it actually frustrated me enough to make an account and post,...

I believe the reason for lack of comments this is kind of, very old news! [?]

I don’t know if the first article written was February 7, 2000, by the Wall Street Journal or not, but this thing has literally been beaten to death since 1998. It has been in the news all over the place beginning in 2000. I can appreciate it, but PushBack: “The Last Days of the Salmon”?, posted on September 27, 2010. I certainly hope that is not the date of their article? If it is, maybe PushBack might want to reconsider its policies?

Right or wrong, the thought process behind that decision was the protection of returning “wild” Coho stock on the spawning beds. That video stirred up quite the fuss, back then and several Oregon policies, procedures, and even laws changed! You might find this of interest?
http://www.orbusinesscouncil.org/docs/hatcheries.pdf

Clubbing of salmon unleashes outrage
A small-town banker becomes an activist after witnessing the killing of hatchery fish and thinks the reason for it is a sham Saturday, March 4, 2000
By Jonathan Brinckman of The Oregonian staff
http://web.archive.org/web/20020112040320/http://www.oregonlive.com/news/00/03/st030404.html


CULLING OF HATCHERY FISH CHALLENGED ; MANAGERS DEEM NON-WILD FISH INFERIOR TO NATURAL SALMON
Article from:The Columbian (Vancouver, WA) Article date: March 16, 2000
Author: ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer

CLUBBING OF HATCHERY FISH WILL CONTINUE, BUT CARCASSES WILL BE USED
Article from:The Columbian (Vancouver, WA) Article date:September 27, 2001
Author:APCopyright

Wild debate over hatchery salmon hits Oregon; Chilling: Massacre prompts questions about methods of saving species
Article from:Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque) Article date: March 24, 2002
AuthorAVID FOSTER

THE SALMON DILEMMA ; SHOULD WILD FISH BE PROTECTED, OR SHOULD HATCHERY FISH SUFFICE?
Article from:The Columbian (Vancouver, WA) Article date:March 24, 2002
AuthorAVID FOSTER, Associated Press writer


Here is the complete ABC News article:
Debate Rages Over Hatchery vs. Wild Salmon
Video Raises Questions in Killing of Hatchery Salmon
Philomath, Ore., April 3

Ron Yechout was elk hunting in the Coast Range a couple years ago when he came upon technicians at the Fall Creek hatchery bashing coho salmon in the head with baseball bats and stripping their blood-red eggs into 5-gallon buckets.

Yechout got his video camera — so incensed was he to learn that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was killing thousands of hatchery fish and millions of their eggs so that about 100 threatened wild Alsea River coho could spawn without competition from their domesticated cousins.

Just as the Zapruder film fueled doubts over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Yechout’s home video is spawning resistance to government efforts to save salmon as he shows it to service clubs and chambers of commerce.

The video has found a receptive audience among people still smarting over logging cutbacks to protect the northern spotted owl. It has also sparked a legislative effort to stop killing hatchery fish and a challenge of the Endangered Species Act.

Hatcheries Since 1872

“We can have a California condor raised in a laboratory and turn them loose and they are wild,” said Yechout, the manager of a bank in this small farming and logging town. “Yet we have a higher standard for fish. There is something wrong with that.”

Hatcheries have been part of the Pacific salmon equation since 1872, when the U.S. Fish Commission built the first one on the McCloud River in Northern California. Since then more than 400 have been established from Alaska to California, turning out more than 325 million juvenile fish a year.
The biggest problem with hatcheries is they make people think they can have salmon without worrying about wiping out their spawning habitat with dams, clearcut logging and overgrazing, biologist Jim Lichatowich argues in his book, Salmon Without Rivers.

Bad Training for Real World

From the very beginning, hatcheries ignored the lifecycle that had made wild salmon thrive for 10,000 years since the last Ice Age. Eggs were routinely shipped as far away as New Zealand, with no regard for the local adaptations the fish had evolved for their home rivers. Gene pools were truncated by spawning a whole generation from the first few fish to come in.

While hatcheries are good at producing fish for people to catch, they are not as good at producing fish to survive in the wild, said Reg Reisenbichler, a biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.
To thrive in a hatchery, fish feed aggressively on the top of the water, where their food pellets are scattered. In the wild, that sort of behavior will get a smolt eaten by a kingfisher.

As a result, hatcheries genetically change the behavior of the fish, and are vulnerable to booms and busts, said Robin Waples, director of conservation biology at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

Hatcheries generally release smolts all at once, so a whole generation can be wiped out hitting the ocean when food is scarce or predators are plentiful. Spawners come back in a bunch, too, making them vulnerable to the weather.

Wild fish are spread out as they migrate to the ocean and return to spawn, so if smolts run into a school of hungry mackerel or the eggs laid by spawners are washed away by flood, there are others behind them.

“The only sure way we know of maintaining salmon into the future is maintaining the natural diversity we know has carried the species through long periods in the past,” Waples said.

Tribes Let Fish Choose

Though still considered experimental by government agencies, tribal fisheries programs think combining higher survival rates of young fish in hatcheries with habitat restoration will bring back more fish for spiritual and economic use.

On the Hood River, which runs off towering Mount Hood into the Columbia, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs have joined with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. They are raising the fish under more natural conditions, and allowing the fish to decide when to go into the river, rather than dumping them out of a truck.

“We feel we’ve got to imitate Mother Nature the best we can,” said Mick Jennings, a former state fisheries biologist now working for the Warm Springs Tribes. “These fish have adapted over thousands of years on their own. The problems in this basin are man-caused activities.”

They haven’t been doing it long enough to see any increase in returning adults, but they have doubled the proportion of young fish reaching the mouth of Hood River, Jennings said.

At Fall Creek hatchery in Oregon’s Coast Range, the coho were bred since the 1950s for fishermen to catch in the ocean. After ocean coho seasons were essentially eliminated in 1993 to protect dwindling wild stocks, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission decided to shut down Fall Creek’s coho program, said Doug DeHart, fisheries chief for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Video of Killing Angers Politicians

Smolt survival was seriously declining, from 5 percent in the 1970s to 0.5 percent in recent years, he said. As a mix of stocks taken from up and down the coast and the lower Columbia River, they lacked the local adaptations evolved by wild fish.

DeHart’s explanations didn’t dissuade two state representatives incensed by Yechout’s video from crafting a bill that would bar the state from killing off hatchery fish and create an expert panel to review the science.

“It just doesn’t make sense to kill an endangered species when we’re trying to keep them alive,” said state Rep. Jeff Kropf, R-Halsey, who with state Rep. Betsy Close, R-Albany, plans to introduce the bill next year.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a property rights organization, lost attempts to stop killing the Fall Creek hatchery coho, but has a lawsuit arguing that the Endangered Species Act protects hatchery coho as well as wild.

“Now because of the Ron Yechout video, we know why salmon are dying,” said foundation attorney Russell Brooks. “The government is killing them.

“That allows them to continue to list coho salmon as a threatened species, which in turn allows them to continue to regulate. In that regulation they control land use and resources. That’s what it is, is a land grab.”

An adviser to the foundation, retired Oregon State University fisheries professor Jim Lannan finds the science favoring wild fish to be weak. He notes that the two strongest wild runs of coho in Oregon are on rivers where salmon ranching operations went bust, leaving their domesticated stock to breed with wild fish.

“All I want to see is some intellectual honesty brought into the argument and see what the public wants,” Lannan said. “If they want culture-based fisheries so they can have the kind of robust offshore fisheries they had several years ago, that’s fine. Or if they want to treat salmon like a museum piece, that’s fine, too.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99347&page=1