Letters

(Re: Letters, the Local, March 18)

Interesting selection of letters last week – I also thought the “eunuch” joke was cheesy, but if you are a male, you will have already experienced the animosity displayed by females if you ever innocently wander into a playground full of children all by yourself – men are easy targets these days.

Besides, it’s the idiots in Ottawa that somebody voted for; despite all that hot air and blather about “feminists” and “diversity” and other popular twaddle, haven’t got a clue about what governing is supposed to mean, even putting in a twit to run the military.

What really got up my nose was the heron and sea lice comments. To me, it’s obvious that if you kill off a large proportion of the principal food of a salmon, the herring (which is going on as we speak), then you are not going to have a robust salmon population. Only 25 percent of the herring catch has the roe that is sought, a small amount goes to food, but the majority of the rest of the catch goes to the rendering plant. Herons are part of the natural infrastructure which eats salmon, just like us, and they have always been here, not like us.

Without herring in abundance, there will be fewer if any salmon, and therefore fewer if any killer whales; with the poaching that is enthusiastically pursued on the Coast (“…27 rock fish…”) and the organized idiots who vacuum up every creature on the beach like they are looking for clues in a murder movie, our inland sea, as compared to 50 years ago, is virtually barren.

People love to trash fish farms, but it is an essential industry. As we are proving daily, the herring roe fishery is demonstrably more important than wild salmon. Even hatcheries are useless if the salmon have nothing to eat. Oysters, prawns, sturgeon and yes, salmon are all successfully farmed, and despite a lot of bleating about lice, how else do you suppose we will be able to feed eight billion people? Wild animals cannot survive extinction if humans are determined to eat them, so the only conclusion is that wild salmon are not sustainable.

Herring eat plankton, and sea lice have a plankton stage, so herring can help with the lice, too, if there are any herring left. When humans muck about with nature, we always get it wrong.

I was also pleased (relieved?) to not see any blather from Dr. Suzuki this week. If you need a weekly dose of “holier than thou,” there is always Mr. Trudeau to consult.

Ken Dibnah, West Sechelt