Do Sea Lions Taste Like Salmon?
A federal agency has authorized the killing of up to 85 California sea lions that prey on migrating salmon and steelhead at the base of Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. Sea lions are wiping out the salmon returning to the rivers to spawn, as they only take one bite out of the salmons bellies where all the fish’s fat is deposited. They just want the fat, not the meat, and of course the injury kills the fish. A full grown sea lion is a huge animal which will kill many 100’s of salmon daily.
So now The Humane Society of the United States wants a federal judge to head off the capturing or killing of the salmon-eating sea lions at Bonneville Dam in the Columbia River, no doubt figuring that live sea lions are better to have around than 1000’s of dead salmon rotting in our drinking water. It said a much larger-than-normal run is predicted this year and that the quota for fishermen has been raised by 33 percent.
What? Where do they get that? Are they nuts? No it isn’t. No it hasn’t. The salmon season has just been closed down along the entire Western coast from California to mid-Oregon because of this!
So I have this suggestion for the Humane Society: Go ahead and let the sea lions wipe out the Columbia River salmon entirely. Then all those sea lions will starve to death in slow agony.
They will. No food, no eat. You dumb bastards.
Then after all the sea lions are dead and gone, we can re-plant the Columbia with baby salmon, and we won’t have to deal with morons like you in the managing of our wildlife, since you only care about furry animals and clearly don’t give a hoot in Hell about us or the fish.
All animals eat and multiply to the limit of their food supply. When they overpopulate, there’s a die-off.
Sea otters eat shellfish and have really nice fur. For a long time they were hunted for their fur until they nearly became extinct, but in the meantime the shellfish industry swelled and thrived. Then it became illegal to kill even one sea otter and now the shellfish industry is wiped out by the sea otters, which then died off and now there are exactly enough otters to eat exactly enough shellfish with none left over for us. When was the last time you enjoyed a plate of abalone strips?
If we did a yearly cull of sea lions and sea otters, the animals would keep a balanced population and we could share in the oceans bounty instead of letting them eat it all.
Baaa
Tags: Columbia River, Humane Society, salmon, sea lions
April 16th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Obviously you can’t expect me to agree on this one, cull Muslims by all means, cull nice little sea lions, no way.
One has to ask why there is an imbalance in the first place, how come these sea lions doing what they have probably done for a million years is now threatening salmon stocks. The answer to such questions is rarely hard, the wastefullness, greed and overabundance of men. We take the fish to the point of extinction and then commercial interests demand action on the tiny amounts taken by other predators.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:16 am
PS You have also not considered the society’s arguments about hydroelectric dams etc. do you know they are wrong?
April 16th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Do you know I don’t care? Of course the lack of salmon is due to us. And that means?
I’m talking about reality, not Dr. Feelgood happy thoughts. We overfished the salmon just like we’ve overfished and overhunted everything else. That’s what we do and we’re running the planet. In order for us to feed our masses, we have to eliminate the competition. This makes us exactly like every other species.
When a raccoon gets into a chicken pen with 200 chickens, it will stay and kill them all. Then it will leave with one or two dead birds and never return. Coniferous trees form forests of just their kind of tree by hogging all the sunlight and making the earth so acid nothing else will grow there.
As for why the excess of sea lions, I suspect it’s because our ancient ancestors killed a lot more of them than we do now, which allowed the salmon to flourish. Sea Lions would have been a wonderful source of meat, fat and furs all in one big, slow-moving lump. Before that, the salmon probably had a hard time surviving and there were a lot less of them.
So piss on shedding tears for sea lions. Kill them and save the salmon! Thanks for your comments, tho.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:48 am
What’s with this westerner bit? Anyway, you had better be darn jolly nice to me as I seem to be 90% of your comments at mo. A bit more I salute your wisdom xoggoth, gosh that’s so true xoggoth etc, will do.