To the Editor,
I think is a swell idea to kill the seals and sea lions so that there are enough fish for the fishermen and the orcas too. If three people are eating from the same bowl, that is running out of food, obviously if you kill one of them there will be more for the others.
Of course if the sea lions and the seals got a vote, I’m sure they would vote for the fishermen to be killed.
Equally if the whales got a vote I think they would go for the fishermen being killed also.
Really that’s two out of three, so if we have any sort of democracy, I think the fishermen should just lay off for a few years at least, and give the other two salmon-eating species a fair chance.
Seriously, it’s no secret humans are overfishing and the oceans of the world are threatened with many species extinctions world wide. To say what goes on in one part of the ocean is unrelated to another would be a stretch when we now realize the planet is smaller than we think. One thing does affect another, often far more than we understand.
This is not a new phenomenon: Oregon and Washington have had to drastically curtail sport and charter fishing, which was the right thing to do. Their fisheries people acted ethically.
Putting pressure on fisheries to kill the sea lions and seals is a rather sad indictment of the human fishers. One does not hear them proposing voluntary restraint, or reducing their catch.
Would the fishermen want to then kill the whales, if killing the sea lions was not enough? One at the feeding bowl is better than two; so why not kill both the sea lions and the orcas and have done with it. this would reduce the problems for the pipeline and the oil tankers also.
I do hope Fisheries and Oceans Canada can move away from this way of thinking. Stop the human fishers from taking too many, let the seals and the orcas find a balance. They have for millennia; it may take maybe five or 10 years, however they probably will. If there’s too many sea lions maybe the transient sea lion- and seal-eating orcas will come back?
Mike Wright,
Port Alberni