The willfully ignorant enviro-nuts have been complaining about the numbers of salmon either staying stagnant or decreasing, depending on the location under observation.
They’d like to blame it on the damming of rivers or commercial fishing operations, but there is an answer to the problem that they don’t want to add to the equation,
Hunters in the U.S. Northwest used to slaughter sea lions, sometimes with machine guns, to sell to glue factories or to send their dried penises to China as an aphrodisiac.
That changed when Congress passed the 1972 Marine Mammals Protection Act outlawing the hunting or exporting of California sea lions and harbor seals. Since then, the number of sea lions on the U.S. West Coast where they live have climbed nearly 60 percent to about 300,000, according to the National Marine Fishery Service. Harbor seals are also more numerous
While individual sea lions and seals don’t take as many fish as a commercial operation, they absolutely take more than any private fisherman is allowed to, and when you have over a quarter-million of the animals eating half their weight in salmon every day, it has a tendency to add up, or should I say, subtract from the numbers of returning fish, especially when the predators don’t go after the ‘sick and weak’ but the prime adults.
Both the enviros and the state and federal Depts. Of Fish and Game refuse to acknowledge this or even consider that maybe, we should look at hunting these animals again, now that their numbers are up.