A Dam Shame
Eighty-five sea lions living in the lower Columbia River have just received a death sentence.
Their crime? Loitering at the base of the Bonneville Dam (on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington), where they devour thousands of migrating salmon struggling to work their way up fish ladders to the smooth water above. (Click on the underwater “fishcam” to see real-time footage of the migrants.)
Earlier this week, the National Marine Fisheries Service authorized state officials to trap—and, if zoos can’t adopt them, kill—the voracious marine mammals.
Pacific salmon have been much in the news of late, and the news has been grim: Officials announced last week that salmon fishing will be banned this year in the Pacific Coast fishery off California and Oregon because of a collapse of the population in the Sacramento River. In the Columbia, the number of salmon has dropped from tens of millions to less than 300,000, according to some estimates.
But conservation and animal rights groups worry that the government is taking aim at the wrong target. John Balzar of the Humane Society of the United States told the Associated Press that the real culprits are commercial fishermen and the dam itself (and 26 other dams) that migrating salmon have to clear on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The dams, Balzar said, kill “nearly 60 percent of juvenile salmon headed downriver.” And that estimate may be low.
If something’s not done about that problem soon, no one—neither sea lion nor human—is going to be eating Columbia River salmon.
Something to Squeal About
If you eat mass-produced pork, you probably owe it to yourself to read “The Trouble with Smithfield,” a scathing critique of the practices of Smithfield Foods, the nation’s biggest hog producer (which seems to get bigger every day). One out of every three piggies that go to market in the United States has a Smithfield pedigree.
Food and Water Watch takes the $11-billion company to task for its history of gobbling up competitors, its factory farming methods, its environmental record, and its treatment of workers—to hit just a few of the high (low?) points of the 10-page screed.
It makes me glad that my Easter ham this year is coming from a small hog farmer one town over.