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March 28, 2024

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Letter: Let nature improve salmon runs

By Larry R. Carey, Vancouver
Published: November 24, 2022, 6:00am

Re: The story in The Columbian titled “Drought leaves fish high and dry” (Our Readers’ Views, Nov. 1): Management-abiding policy is a deadly roadblock. It would be wiser to stock huge numbers of brood stock while adjusting salmon to return in cooler times.

Add smolt to return and spawn. This would produce more of the later returns of fish. We’re working with fish that can no longer survive, and not allowing them to adapt. Recovery projects are in hot water; dictated science without productive culturing needs has no future. What has grown with the Endangered Species Act isn’t salmon populations; it’s a nightmare. Using questionable fish as a result of this act is foolish and inadequate.

We sacrificed millions across the board to gain nothing. The Endangered Species Act allowing wild fish to be harvested is bigoted unfairness. The wild salmon are changed forever and unrecognizable. The Endangered Species Act underestimated the effects of wild and hatchery salmon spawning together and entrenched the volumes there already. Wild salmon are still harvested during the environmental countdown to death.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, your wishy-fishy science experiment just hit rock bottom. It’s suffering to still not utilize hatchery fish — your cull is insanity. Culling in a retracting resource is senseless. Quit this refusal to give nature the chance to select the fittest.

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