Ever wonder why your "peer reviewed research" doesn't get the level of respect from regulators you think it deserves?
It is not because it is some great conspiracy to protect the interests of salmon farmers, it is because it is shoddy, unsupported, thoroughly flawed and based on biased assumptions.
Science is not about massaging data and collecting support for a hypothesis, it is about looking for things to invalidate it.
If any of the speculative, fill in the blanks pseudoscience created by the likes of Morton and Krkosek (and his wonderfully predictive models) actually mirrored what was happening in reality - it would certainly be a different story.
Fortunately, there is no evidence to be found looking at any number of historical returns which shows a negative impact which could be even remotely linked to the presence of farms.
The majority of people need not go further than this simple truth, but some, like you guys, seek to gather any type of material which supports your idea that farms are bad.
By constantly ignoring, or suppressing evidence which runs counter to the hypothesis of farms doing harm, opponents of aquaculture fail in not only scientific methodology - but logic as well.
There will most likely never be a paper written that definitively proves farms have no impact, because it is quite plain to see.
Just imagine the rest of the country looking at this scenario:
- Some fishermen are mad at salmon farmers because they think that the farms are killing the wild salmon they want to catch and kill,
- The fish keep returning in varying numbers all over the coast - regardless of the presence of farms,
- When the runs are low the fishermen get even madder at the farms, but don't stop fishing
- When the runs are high the fishermen shrug and say it must be ocean conditions, and keep fishing
If you guys can't see the hypocrisy and oh so delicious irony here, I can't help you.
So, there you go - I do like salmon farming, and that is my rational reason for it.
