The Written Word
for March 15, 2000

We are playing Russian Roulette with our Pacific Coast Salmon and the odds will soon shorten.

When the fish farmers first came to town with Atlantic Salmon they assured us of a number of things. First of all, they wouldn’t spread disease or cause lice in native fish. They wouldn’t escape from their pens. If, alternatively, they did escape they couldn’t survive in the wild. Even of they did escape and if they did survive, they never ever could possibly reproduce themselves and supplant native salmon.

There is a moratorium on new fish farms which was put in place at the time we had those assurances and there was little evidence that they were not true. That has changed – dramatically. There now is plenty of evidence of disease though, fortunately for us, it is confined to Europe. There is lots and lots of evidence of sea lice wiping out native fish but again, happily for us, this is confined to sea run Brown trout (Sea Trout) in Scotland and Ireland. Fish have been escaping in huge numbers off the BC coast. They have indeed survived, have made it into local rivers and have now in certified instances too many to deny, reproduced themselves.

With all this, the department calls this an acceptable risk to native stocks.

Let’s look for a moment on this "acceptable" risk and let’s look at it logically. If you were to have a gun with 25 chambers and only one bullet, and you were to put it to your temple and start pulling the trigger, you incur a risk. Each time you pull it the odds are one in 25 that the bullet will fire and kill you. BUT, and this is the big but, if you decide that you will continue pulling it forever, while the odds of the pin firing remain one in 25 for each pull, it is a mathematical certainty that it will go off some time.

This how it is with fish farming. The odds that on any given day fish will escape, survive, take to the river and breed are quite modest. But if those pens are there without any time constraint whatever, it is mathematically certain that our native fish stocks will be adversely affected.

How badly will they be affected?

No one can say. But those who always felt that the offshore salmon farms would be trouble, and have been so resoundingly vindicated, point out that our river systems today are vastly different than they were much earlier in the century when people actually tried to transplant Atlantic salmon here. Back then the river capacities for spawning salmon, including steelhead, were jammed. Run after run, in their own time, filled the rivers and the redds where the eggs were laid. There was no spare capacity for another species to take hold.

It’s different now. Runs of both Steelhead and Chinook, for example, are badly depleted. There is room for a newcomer to take hold.

The next argument will be like the Cigarette companies claiming that cancer is good for you, or the US Armed forces claiming that they had to destroy the Vietnamese village in order to save it … that Atlantic Salmon are good for us.

Well, they’re not. It would be foolish enough to replace our own fish with exotics under the best of circumstances – if we were planting eggs to raise fish that would have all the characteristics necessary to be strong and disease free. But we’re not. The transplanting is done by fish that have been bred to grow quickly so as to find a place at the dining room table.

The people of British Columbia have been euchred into believing that the onus is on them to demonstrate that fish farming is dangerous. It ought not to be that way but precisely the other way around.

It may already be too late to stop these fools who put the short term gain of their pocketbooks against what God gave us in such abundance, that we have all but ruined. We’ve done this because of a population that cares little and a government that cares even less.

It is truly to weep.