Federal Petition - ban ocean cage salmon farming in Canada

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ShellBack":3eit21tj said:
Done and lets hope somebody listens.
Terry
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Terry,

I see you are from Victoria! We are in Victoria at an Airbnb, headed for Nanaimo today. We'll be returning to Victoria Thursday the 14th and leaving on the Friday morning ferry back to Anacortes. We are meeting Bill and Dorothy (Blue Skies) for dinner tonight, Blake and Rhonda (C-Fury for lunch tomorrow) in Nanaimo, and hopefully Martin and Andrea (Nomad) in Comox tomorrow night. Any chance we could hook up for a coffee (or beer or whatever) Thursday afternoon or evening?

I will PM you our email and cell numbers!

Pat and Patty Anderson
Daydream
CD25 Cruiser
 
I just came back from a summer cruising around the north half of Vancouver Island, Broughtons, PLI, Jervis Inlet, Discovery Islands and happened to be in the Alert Bay marina when the Sea Shepherd boat, the Martin Sheen came in with Alexandra Mortin and the salmon research crew on board. I was privileged to be able to attend the meetings with the First Nations Elders at the Big House in Alert Bay and hear about the affects the open pen Fish farming in the native waters is doing to the wild salmon populations. I would sign if I could and since I can't, I will make it a point to talk to anyone I can about the farmed Atlantic Salmon on the market shelves.

Harvey
SleepyC :moon

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Also - friends don't let friends eat farmed salmon. They don't taste that great AND they cause damage to wild salmon. Eating them is a lose-lose proposition.
 
So what is your solution????

Everyone hates farmed fish yet the demand for protein continues to grow with the expanding world population. So what do you want to do? Limit the amount of protein per person? Reduce the population? Turn people into Soylent Green? It is obvious to me that wild salmon and hatchery production is not keeping up with the demand as returns keep going down. If you want to ban farmed fish, don't you think you should have a solution?
 
forrest":680nln7v said:
So what is your solution????

Everyone hates farmed fish yet the demand for protein continues to grow with the expanding world population. So what do you want to do? Limit the amount of protein per person? Reduce the population? Turn people into Soylent Green? It is obvious to me that wild salmon and hatchery production is not keeping up with the demand as returns keep going down. If you want to ban farmed fish, don't you think you should have a solution?
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There's many answers to this:
1) Commercial fishing as an industry will ultimately fail due to over fishing. Just as we don't let commercial operations hunt wild mammals on the land anymore, ultimately the same must happen in our oceans. Leave the fish there for recreational uses and you'll gain far more economic benefit per pound of harvest than you do from commercial fishing.
2) Fish farming is a viable option for fish. Open-net pen fish farming in terminal areas (e.g. near the mouths of rivers and near other main wild fish migration paths) is not. Fish farming - even salmon farming - can be done (and is done) on land in closed systems that don't do near so much damage to the environment and wild stocks. It does (in some cases) cost more money. But I would argue that fish prices are artificially low since the true cost to society is not being passed onto consumers (except perhaps when the stocks are so depleted that prices rise). One of the costs of fish farming in open net pens in terminal areas is a reduction in wild stocks that in turn effects not only the higher value recreational fishing industry but the local environment - strong salmon returns put a lot of organic material back into streams and forests. Fish farms also damage the environment immediately below them turning the sea floor into virtual deserts of life. Those costs are not figured into the price we pay for the fish and are, in effect, society subsidizing the industry.
3) We can all actually get all the protein we need from plants - soy in particular. Environmentally, this is a much better solution than eating animals but few (including me) are willing to make that choice at this point in time. However, someday, we may need to.
4) Why do you think returns keep going down? Part of the answer is due to damage from fish farms in terminal areas, much of it is due to overfishing and environmental damage in the rivers and streams in which the fish breed and spawn. We can control many of these factors if we chose to do so and are willing to pay the costs necessary to do so. Overfishing is a huge problem but it can be controlled if we are willing to enforce it and reduce fishing fleets.

Notice how none of my potential solutions involve reducing population or reducing protein per person?
 
There are a ton of solutions that don't involve fish cages. There are non restorative (i.e. additive) hatcheries that are doing a great job producing protein (don't confuse this with restoring native salmon!) at a far shorter ecological cost than net pens. This is easily the cheapest (by a little) and dirtiest (by a lot) way to make more salmon.

What occurs in short is the aggregation of fish causes diseases that are rare in the wild to be transmitted broadly between fish in the pens. They are then communicated to wild fish that migrate through the area as the contageons causing these diseases (usually viruses) are found from bank to bank of a channel with a net pen, when diseases are present.

So, the wild runs of salmon are being absolutely hammered by disease and once rare problems are now common and prevalent. The value of intact wild salmon runs dwarfs the value of net pen salmon in almost every way, and the two can't really coexist together in the manner they now are.

The point BC fisheries are at now is that they face the collapse of many wild stocks due to net pens.

The demand for protein isn't so great that we need to resort to these damaging means that deplete our medium and long-term sustainable resources (the wild runs) to grow some fish quickly and make some money.

We only just sold all the pink salmon that was canned in 2013 for crying out loud! And more fish were caught in 2015 than in 2013. We haven't even gotten the bulk of those cans anywhere near a dinner table. The VAST majority of these fish are produced in additive hatcheries. There is some evidence that hatcheries used to restore endangered runs do more harm than good (Columbia River) but properly sited, hatcheries that only seek to produce more fish are a runaway success!

People often assume that farmed fish are a responsible choice as they are most aware of overfishing as the main threat to fisheries. The producers of farmed salmon play upon their assumption and every aspect of the retail side of this business exploits this misperception.

This activity is nothing but destructive (except to the short-term financial gain of a few) and it is totally reasonable to abandon this failed method of raising fish in favor of far better alternatives that are available today.

BC is very short on time to abandon these cages. This effort should be applauded and supported by anyone who cares at all about salmon fisheries and maintaining any of the remaining wild salmon runs in BC.
 
Kushtaka and rogerbum have written eloquent and detailed precision indictments of open net pen salmon farming. I wish I could do half as good a job of it.
 
Good job! I hate the salmon farms for an entirely different reason. Sardine seines net all the bait and bottom fish so the fish processing industry can grind the biomass up for protein pellets to feed the farmed fish. The sardine sienes have decimated the west coast bait fish populations just as they have done to the menhaden on the east coast. There has been a ban on the federal level for the last two years. The seines were only supposed to take 15% of the biomass and they ended up taking 90%. This is the biggest problem with the poor fishing at Westport. There aren't any bait schools left for the Columbia River salmon to stop and feed on. The salmon just swim on by...no reason to stop if there isn't any fish to eat.
 
forrest":1xmql7g9 said:
Good job! I hate the salmon farms for an entirely different reason. Sardine seines net all the bait and bottom fish so the fish processing industry can grind the biomass up for protein pellets to feed the farmed fish. The sardine seines have decimated the west coast bait fish populations just as they have done to the menhaden on the east coast.
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It takes about 12 lbs of fish when fed to farm salmon to produce ONE pound of farm salmon.

The fish farms take fish that are edible to humans, and bait fish, to make their salmon. Wild salmon eat krill and catch their own bait fish in the mid Pacific oceans to grow. The wild fish feed themselves as they are supposed to, while the farm fish need to be fed valuable protein and drugs to create a low quality product.

Not considered is how arrogant it is to destroy a wild food source for current profit! The wild salmon have been feeding the people of the coast for 10,000 plus years. Should we destroy the wild salmon in just one generation for the profit of a few?
 
Larry H":24fuz36o said:
forrest":24fuz36o said:
Good job! I hate the salmon farms for an entirely different reason. Sardine seines net all the bait and bottom fish so the fish processing industry can grind the biomass up for protein pellets to feed the farmed fish. The sardine seines have decimated the west coast bait fish populations just as they have done to the menhaden on the east coast.
Click to expand...

It takes about 12 lbs of fish when fed to farm salmon to produce ONE pound of farm salmon.

The fish farms take fish that are edible to humans, and bait fish, to make their salmon. Wild salmon eat krill and catch their own bait fish in the mid Pacific oceans to grow. The wild fish feed themselves as they are supposed to, while the farm fish need to be fed valuable protein and drugs to create a low quality product.

Not considered is how arrogant it is to destroy a wild food source for current profit! The wild salmon have been feeding the people of the coast for 10,000 plus years. Should we destroy the wild salmon in just one generation for the profit of a few?
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And that's a really important point. The bait fish used to feed the farmed salmon are, for economic reasons, generally harvested relatively near shore where they would feed the returning salmon. The bait fish the wild salmon feed on most of the time is farther offshore in the arctic.
 
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