Some forty years ago, when Canada’s east coast commercial seal hunt was the cause celebre of a somewhat nascent animal protection movement in Canada (and I was in the thick of it), marine biologists with whom I conferred opined that the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was the most ineptly dysfunctional of all government agencies. The charge was not entirely fair in that a major part of the problem came from political leadership decisions responding to the desire for votes, which led to bad choices by bureaucrats ignoring scientific evidence. Facts really do matter and the most obviously disastrous result was the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, and the decline or closure of numerous other once vibrant fisheries country-wide.
Nothing’s changed. For some years, the government has defended the Pacific salmon farming industry, denying concerns raised by their own scientists, environmentalists, fishermen, and First Nations that the farms were spreading disease and parasites to wild stocks. Wild salmon are critical not only to the commercial interests of fishers and the cultural and gastronomic interests of First Nations people, but to the overall ecology of Pacific coast forests and their fauna – including the iconic bears of the region – and to the needs of various marine-life, as they are a major food source for some populations of orcas, sea otters, seals, and sealions.
Recently, underwater cinemaphotographer Tavish Campbell found, filmed, collected, and had independently analysed clouds of bloody fish-farm effluent discharged into the ocean from local fish farms. The analysis showed that the red clouds were contaminated with piscine reovirus (PRV), deadly to wild fish stocks.
Only with Campbell’s lights could the red cloud and glittering salmon scales be seen in the deep, dark waters, with wild fish swimming nearby. As ugly as it appears in the video, we are being blandly assured that by DFO that there’s nothing to worry about. The effluent, the fish farms claim, has been treated to kill pathogens. But, the PRV was found and has to be added to the problem of salmon lice and the loss of genetic integrity in the source of food to feed concentrated numbers of farmed salmon. It becomes clear DFO is playing with a dangerous game of ecological Russian roulette.
Meanwhile, scapegoating wildlife is a popular response to declines in wild salmon stocks. Never mind upstream dams blocking migration route or toxic run-off from farm fields and now salmon farms, cormorants are killed on their nesting ground. Sealions and seals, mergansers, even Caspian terns, get blamed for declines in wild salmon numbers. Orcas are spared only because they are endangered, but for some orcas, salmon are a major food source, so how will orcas become “un-endangered” without food? Salmon used to be incredibly abundant, but fish populations around the world are in decline, and sadly, in Canada, it is as bad as anywhere. Stop blaming cormorants and seals; start working on real and effective solutions.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry