When I first went out to Oregon City to look for sea lions, I didn’t know much about the issue. Now I’ve seen the lions at both Willamette Falls and the Bonneville Dam. I’ve done a lot more research and I’ve thought it over carefully.
I now totally oppose the killing of sea lions at Bonneville Dam, and I’m pissed that the authorities are now seeking permission to kill sea lions at Willamette Falls as well.
The spring Chinook salmon season is over, now, and the sea lions have gone off to their coastal mating grounds (except for the 12 that were killed.) The issue won’t come up again until next spring, when more sea lions will be killed. That’s despite the fact that, according to the Oregonian, the killing of sea lions at Bonneville failed to reduce the number of salmon being killed by the sea lions.
In other words, culling doesn’t work. Or in other words, it would only work if they killed ALL the sea lions at the dam.
Forty years ago, that’s what they would have done. Until the late 1960s, there was a bounty on sea lion heads in Oregon. And that’s an important backdrop to this story.
Back then, they thought that removing predators would increase the number of salmon, just as fishermen in Japan slaughter dolphins, thinking that it will increase the number of fish they catch.
We now know that removing top predators from a food chain in bad for the entire ecosystem. But this plan to kill sea lions isn’t intended to protect the ecosystem. It’s intended to protect fishermen — and that in only a short-sighted, short-term way.
The influence of the sport fishing lobby has often been good for the environment, but here I feel they’ve totally lost their heads. There needs to be a long term goal of increasing the numbers of wild salmon, not preserving individual fishery salmon so that they can be caught on lines instead of eaten by sea lions.
Vengeance should have no place in this equation. Neither should a certain bizarre and outdated way of describing these animals as if they were people — bad people.
The Oregon City News, for instance, quotes Oregon House Speaker Dave Hunt (D-Clackamas):
“The sea lions grab the fish right out of the water and take a bite out of them in plain view before they throw them away,” he said. “Fundamentally, they’re bullies.”
Over and over again, the sea lions are portrayed as interlopers, gluttonous, belligerent, obese creatures who don’t play by the rules. Actually they’re just doing what they’ve always done, or at least, what they always did, before we nearly wiped them out, just a few decades ago.
Photo: A flyer posted on the bulletin board at Bonneville Dam
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