If this lawsuit succeeds you fellas may get your "natural order" but you can likely kiss most of our hatchery programs goodbye because prv has been found pretty much everywhere including hatcheries from alaska to washington. On a brighter note maybe the alaskan salmon ranching would be shut down too! Considering this maybe its time to really look at the facts about prv situation in BC and the whole coast for that matter and seriously evaluate the risk and make the divide between the reckless fear mongering morton tactics and the actual facts. Your call guys.
We really are up to our armpits in Fish Farm employees and PR Hacks on our little sport fishing forum. I guess we should be honored that you consider us such a threat that we are worth expending all that effort and resources. I am just happy that so far I have not had to watch more fish farm TV ad propaganda during the hockey playoffs.
You may well be correct that the Atlantic feedlot industry and their government proxies will try and use the threat of closing down our hatcheries to leverage the protection of the open pen feedlot industry.
I have notice they want to increase testing of hatchery fish and knowing the Harper/Conservative government would like to save even the pathetically pitiful amount of funding they put into Pacific Salmon enhancement through support of our hatcheries. If tax dollars are not used as corporate welfare what good are they, right.
They can go ahead and try to close down our hatcheries, many of them volunteer funded and operated. If they think they have taken some political heat on the underfunding of Search and Rescue and the Coast Guard they have not seen anything compared to what will happen if they Pizz off hundreds of thousands of anglers by trying to kill off our hatcheries out of spite and political gamesmanship.
The Conservatives are spending the political capital at a fast pace and they are going to find that they are not going to want to jeopardize even a portion of those votes. They are going to need every vote come the next federal election and so are future provincial governments. Politics is not only about money; it is also about survival.
I would point out that neither Alaska ranching nor local Pacific Salmon enhancement hatcheries use Alien Atlantic Salmon with their Atlantic diseases. Diseases that Pacific Salmon have not evolved to be resistant too.
Further; they do not involve raising to adulthood and treating millions of adult fish in pens which are perfect large open petri dishes for quickly evolving and spreading even more virulent and resistant disease of both the Pacific and Atlantic variety. Then of course there is that lice parasite problem and the pesticide resistance that develops.
I don’t even like that the pens are eyesores that clog up and pollute our inlets, impair navigation of the public waterways, trap and kill sea lions and now possibly whales, and that their business model is driven by the need to grow and install ever more pens while increasingly vacuuming up the feed resources for food pellets that Pacific Salmon and other Pacific species need.
I have noticed the industry shrills like to attack Alaska’s ranching model which they see as competition for their open pen disease factories and which sets a bad example because they know Alaska won’t let their damaging discredited open pen industry into their waters. Given a choice, I would take Alaska’s model over the open pen Atlantic salmon industry in a heart beat.
