Fisheries: Salmon plight misrepresented
By Dave Mergle, The Times July 12, 2012
Informed citizens cannot sit idly by while misguided fish activists play fast and loose with the facts. Elena Edwards’s reference to the collapse of the sockeye returns in 2009 [Environment: Salmon disappearing, July 5 Letters, www.mrtimes.com] ignores a few inconvenient truths such as:
– The Fraser sockeye return in subsequent years, including 2010, was record setting in its high numbers.
– IHN virus comes from wild sockeye to farmed Atlantics, not the other way around.
– Wild salmon are immune to the IHN virus. This includes young smolts.
– Samples from supermarkets to which Ms. Edwards refers were improperly collected by her fish activist colleagues in an unscientific manner that made any analysis impossible (but made great headlines).
Misguided activists like Ms. Edwards continue to ignore the fact that wild fish stocks around the world continue to decline because of over fishing, climate change, and in the case of B.C.’s wild salmon, increased competition for food while at sea, due to the billions of Alaska hatchery fish that are released into the wild every year.
Fish farming, if anything, provides a release valve to meet the enormous growing demand for salmon protein as an alternative to B.C.’s precious wild salmon.
Most would agree B.C.’s wild salmon are a treasure and an icon that needs to be protected… from misguided activists whose obsessive focus on the environmentally friendly practice of farming salmon prevents the search for the true reasons wild fish are at risk.
If misguided activists like Ms. Edwards truly were concerned with protecting wild salmon, they would spend less time on dogmatic rhetoric and knowingly spreading misinformation, and more time on supporting farms that help relieve pressure on wild fish.
But I suppose the easy thing to do is obsessively point the finger at a scapegoat, even when the data overwhelmingly points in another direction.
Dave Mergle, Port Moody
Dave Mergle responded to the following letter:
Environment: Salmon disappearing
By Elena Edwards, The Times July 5, 2012
Will the public remain silent while wild salmon disappear?
The Fraser River is home to one of the world’s most spectacular and inspiring salmon runs in the world. Or at least it was.
Here we are, three years after the alarming 2009 collapse of the Fraser River Sockeye salmon, the $26 million dollar inquiry into their decline, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) forecasts for returns are way off, two years in a row.
Here we are three years later, with another bleak run predicted.
Meanwhile, DFO remains mostly mute about the ever-mounting evidence that the arrow is pointing directly at salmon farms correlating with the suffering salmon runs.
Young salmon smolts are swimming by salmon farms that are infected with a deadly outbreak of IHN (Infectious Haematopoietic Necrosis).
World-renowned labs have confirmed the presence of the deadly European strain of infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAv) in market-farmed salmon and a wild Vedder River chum. Positive tests have also come in for the potentially lethal piscine reovirus. Salmon leukemia was found by DFO scientist Dr.Kristi Miller, and she was muzzled by the Privy Council to speak of her findings.
Salmon farmers refuse to allow Dr. Miller or independent scientists to test the farmed salmon.
The BC Liberal government wants to ram through a legislation that would fine and jail people like wild salmon advocate Dr. Alex Morton for speaking out about diseases coming from fish farms.
Why are we allowing this to happen? Government is protecting an industry that has decimated wild salmon around the world. Why? So stores can sell “fresh” diseased farmed salmon?
The public must speak up on behalf of wild salmon and demand better for the salmon that give so much to this world, before we lose this precious species forever.
Elena Edwards, Mission
