New Rules Will Include Hatchery Salmon In Pacific NW Fish Counts

[hatrack]

SEATTLE, April 28 - "The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act.

This represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act.

The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered.

EDIT

"This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place," said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited. "We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act." Six of the world's leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports."

EDIT

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4856765/

[Redneck Socialist]

1. Ruin all the habitat, kill all the fish? No problem

we'll just whip up few more at the fish factory and dump in the river. See? Problem solved.

Is Helen Chenowith running the show now? She once said that salmon can't be endangered because she can buy all she wants at the grocery store.

These stupid fuckers drive me into a blind rage.

[enough]

2. Nothing is too much for these people.

For such religious zealots, they certainly don't seem to give a damn for god's creation.

[theoceansnerves]

3. it's because the rapture is coming

see, they can freely trash the earth, because the rapture is coming and it won't matter anyway!