How Envriomental Are We?

[Freedomx]

I read this article and a relevant thread on another forum. I HAVE to be missing something. Anyone who has read my posts knows I am not a big fan of big government :), but this seems to strange even for me not to question.

So I did the only logical thing readily available. I decided to drop it into Straight Dope and see it get shredded form every angle until nothing but the truth is left.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/00/03/st030404.html

Clubbing of salmon unleashes outrage

In late 1998, while elk hunting with a friend, Yechout, 58, came across five employees of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife clubbing hundreds of coho salmon with baseball bats. The fish had returned to the hatchery of their birth on Fall Creek.

“It made me madder than hell,” he said. “All we hear, over and over, is our fish are going extinct. The fish aren’t going extinct: The state is out there, killing them by the thousands.”

Yechout made a video of what he saw, with close-up images of large fish being struck until they stopped moving. Then he took to the road, showing his video at Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary Clubs, schools, cafes and restaurants. He even spoke at a specially convened meeting of state lawmakers.

Hatchery fish, DeHart said, can hurt wild fish by competing for their food and habitat. Hatchery fish are poorly adapted to life in the wild, state fish biologists believe, saying they mistake a hawk’s shadow as a prompt to rise and feed, for example. Such habits, if passed on as behavior traits in wild fish, can lead to an overall decline in salmon numbers, they say.

Does anybody think this makes sense? Didn’t these fish survive in the wild to come back to where they were hatched?

That guarantees millions of dollars each year to fund salmon-restoration efforts, Yechout said, and gives the government justification for imposing stiff stream-protection rules on landowners.

“It’s heavy stuff,” he said this week in an after-hours interview in his office. “But stop and think about it: Can you think of better reason why? How better could they come out and control these waterways and control people’s property rights?”

So what’s up? Is the this a problem that the government won’t let be solved? Or is this just a misunderstanding?

What am I missing here.

To me, this seems like a whole lot of government waste. They seem to be clinging on to the protected status of the salmon in order to maintain their restrictions on private landowners.

(just trying to turn it into a debate there )

[Freedomx]

There is nothing that sucks more than putting a typo in the topic line.

[SingleDad]

Sounds like a giant government screw-up to me.

I’m no biologist, but the concept that hatchery salmon differ significantly from wild fish sounds, well, fishy <groan!> Salmon don’t have many brain cells to begin with; I can’t see that might learn or not learn anything because of their origins.

And the whole scheme of creating the hatchery, letting them loose, and killing the ‘surplus’ makes no sense. If you’re going to use the hatchery, then why not release the fish and let natural selection take its course?

It’s incomprehensible to Yechout that hatchery salmon are being prevented from spawning in the wild. That it defies logic takes Yechout to a very disturbing conclusion: Government officials have ordered the killing of hatchery salmon to ensure that wild salmon remain scarce.

I agree with Mr. Yechout’s premise, but not his conclusion. I think it was Heinlein who said, “Never ascribe to evil what you can attribute to stupidity.” I think this principle applies here.

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He’s the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor, shouting ‘All Gods are Bastards!’

[justwannano]

They probably know more about salmon than we do.
It was just not good press.
I cannot think of another good reason for doing it other than it is bad for the salmon