Columbia River Sea Lions: The Guns Could Begin Firing Within Days

By Columbiana
Portland Indymedia Newswire

I want to introduce you to someone. This is C404. He is a unique, intelligent being. In this photograph, you get a sense of his playful nature. He’s like this. More than many sea lions, he seems to seek out human contact. I’ve known him for years, and although I always try to maintain a respectful distance from my wild neighbors, this guy has often followed me in the water when I am out on the river. He frequently lays on his side and waves a flipper at me. He can be silly and clown around, and he can also be unexpectedly warm and friendly. The Columbia river is his home at this time of the year, as it has been home to countless generations of sea lions before him, for thousands, upon thousands of years. And he is in danger. Wildlife officials want to kill this being, perhaps as soon as next week, unless you stop them.

The reason that they give is that he must eat. Like all sea lions before him, he must catch fish, his natural prey, and eat them in order to survive. And he is good at it. He’s also one of a decreasing number of wild animals who is comfortable co-existing with humans and their entrapments, and that is why wildlife officials say they want to use lethal force against him. They say that C404 is too smart and too gregarious for his own good. They say that, because he eats salmon, and because salmon are endangered, and especially because he knows how to catch fish at the Bonneville Dam, he should give up his life to “save” the salmon. But is it really necessary to take this being’s life, and will such a tremendous sacrifice really save the salmon?

The answer to both of these questions is a resounding no.

As I have said in earlier articles on this site, it is not the sea lions who are causing the extinction of the wild salmon. And killing sea lions will not save the salmon, because it does not address the true causes of the decline of the salmon. Salmon populations are crashing all up and down the west coast. And, indeed, large fish are disappearing from the oceans all across the planet. Sea lions are not to blame for this, and those calling for sea lion blood know this. They simply do not want you to know this. Because if you came to understand what is really causing the salmon crisis, you would demand a solution, and they would be forced to act in accordance with the law. And this would mean tough sacrifices involving multi-million dollar industries. Much easier, they figure, to extract great sacrifices from sea lions, than to extract them from the fishing industry, the power industry, the timber industry. But the sea lions would not agree with this trade-off. The Columbia river ecosystem would not agree with it. Even the salmon would not agree with it. Facts, logic, and reason do not agree with such a trade-off. And I do not agree with it.

Killing C404, or any of the other sea lions of the Columbia river, will not help the salmon pull out of their precipitous nosedive toward extinction. How do I know this? Well, let’s consult history.

The first humans to come to Cascadia found both the salmon and the sea lions to be plentiful beyond imagination. Native Americans immortalized seals and sea lions in their art and in their stories. Carvings of sea lions stretch back into the distant reaches of history, going back thousands of years. The archaeological record, including the bones of sea lions, shows that they have been inhabiting this region for at least 10,000 years, and that they once lingered here year round (rather than only drifting through in the spring, as they do now). And yet, even with all of those sea lions in the Columbia river for all those many years, the salmon were nevertheless so plentiful as to be uncountable. Stories abound in Native lore about the salmon being so bountiful that one could “walk across the waters on their backs.”

By the time Lewis and Clark came trudging through the region, salmon and sea lions and humans had already been co-existing here for millennia. In their journals, Lewis and Clark recorded both seals and sea lions far up the Columbia, all the way to Celilo Falls, in vast numbers. And yet, the salmon, too, were so numerous that the explorers were shocked at their fecundity. They described the Columbia as being “crowded with salmon.” They remarked on the sight of salmon in the deep, clear waters, and during the ancient spawning ritual, William Clark’s journal records the following sight: “The number of dead salmon on the shores and floating in the river is incredible to say.”

It is estimated that there were between 16 and 20 million salmon on the Columbia river at the time of Lewis and Clark. Sixteen to 20 MILLION salmon. Imagine. And this is in spite of the “great numbers” of sea lions encountered by the expedition between Celilo Falls and the mouth of the Columbia. It is not known how many sea lions were here at that time, but it is clear that there were MANY more then than there are now. (While some people complain that there are “just too many” sea lions in the region now, they are nowhere close to their historical levels. They are only beginning to rebound after being nearly driven to extinction by human predation. They’re doing well since the Marine Mammal Protection Act ended the slaughter of sea lions in 1972, but they do not require, and have never required, human “management” to control their numbers.)

If the sea lions were co-existing with salmon on the Columbia river for ten thousand years without reducing their numbers, then what happened? Where have all the salmon gone?

A quick history lesson: The commercial fishing industry discovered the region in the mid to late 1800s. It was at this time that the salmon met capitalism. Prior to this, those who feasted upon the salmon (from the birds to the bears to the humans to the sea lions) took only what they needed to sustain themselves. But with capitalism, came an incentive to take much, much more than anyone really needed, and convert the “surplus” into profit. The vast and uncountable salmon runs looked like a goldmine to people who believed the Columbia owed them a living. Then, as now, the focus was on short-term profit rather than long term sustainability. So canneries began cropping up on the Columbia, and thus began the beginning of the end of the salmon. In the mid to late 1800s, nearly 2000 commercial fishing boats crowded the waters and more than 50 canneries lined the river, churning out more than 40 MILLION pounds of dead salmon EVERY YEAR. Such predation was not required to sustain the fishermen and their families. They took the fish, not to feed themselves, but to get rich off their flesh. The avarice was so shocking that, even as far back as the 1800s, a US fishing official expressed concern that this over-fishing would destroy the great runs that had always sustained the region. No one heeded his warning, and the orgy continued for another century.

At the same time that this wholesale slaughter was occurring, the ancient forests that had blanketed the mountains of Cascadia for millennia were being stripped from the skin of the earth, clouding ancient spawning beds with silt and robbing them of cooling shade. Salmon habitat was becoming unlivable. The salmon began to decline. In spite of the frenzy to catch as many fish as they could stuff into their nets, the count of salmon flesh taken from the river fell, year after year. It dropped steadily from a high of around 43 million pounds per year to around 14 million pounds or so per year in the 1940s. And it was around this time that the dams began to fester and grow along the river, like arteriosclerosis.

Even more than the over-fishing, the dams had a sudden, devastating, and catastrophic impact upon the salmon. They closed off whole swaths of river, blocking the runs from their ancient spawning beds. Miles upon miles of river were stolen away from the salmon, and the once cold, swirling waters in which they had evolved became deep, still, warm, and stagnant almost overnight. The salmon could not survive in this. At one time, the summer run was the most plentiful of the great Chinook runs. The fishermen called the summer Chinook “June Hogs,” and eagerly sought them out year after year. But over-fishing began to gut their numbers, and the Grand Coulee Dam finally erased them from the earth in the late 1930s. The summer runs never returned.

Interestingly, at the same time that the salmon were disappearing from the Columbia, so were the sea lions. They were being hunted to the brink of extinction themselves, for blubber, for meat, for their skins, and even just for human entertainment. People made sport of killing them, and made dog food from their flesh. Like the salmon, the sea lions were nearly driven from the face of the earth by human predation. (At one time, there were estimated to be fewer than 2000 sea lions left in all of California, and fewer still in Cascadia.) It was not until the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 finally made it illegal to kill any marine mammal that the sea lion began to recover from this disaster.

Obviously, then, if the sea lions and the salmon co-existed for at least ten thousand years without any reduction to the salmon, and if the numbers of salmon and sea lions were both spiraling into decline in the century after commercial fishing discovered this region, then it is not the sea lions who are causing the extinction of the salmon. (If sea lion predation were so devastating to salmon, then the number of salmon in the river should have been low when Lewis and Clark arrived on the scene, and should have been increasing, not decreasing, as the sea lions were being hunted to extinction on the river.) Perhaps, if the Marine Mammal Protection Act had also made it illegal for humans to kill salmonids, the salmon might be recovering now, as the sea lions have been. But humans have continued to catch and kill the salmon, and their numbers have not recovered.

This, then, is the timeline:
Salmon have been on the Columbia river for at least 100 million years.
Sea lions have been on the Columbia river for at least 10 thousand years.
After at least ten thousand years of co-existence with sea lions, the salmon runs of the Columbia nevertheless numbered tens of millions of fish.
Commercial fleets and capitalism came to the Columbia river about a century and a half ago, and more than 200 dams began cropping up in the region about a half century ago.
While the sea lions were able to live with the salmon for at least 100 centuries without reducing the runs, the humans took only one century to drive the runs down from 20 million fish to roughly 1 percent of their historical levels.

Human predation, under the demands and strange incentives of capitalism, has led the salmon toward extinction. The only way to lead the salmon away from that brink is by curbing human predation. Not by killing sea lions.

So long as we ignore this fact and scapegoat sea lions (or birds, or any of the other “culprits” who have been accused of endangering the salmon in the past), we allow the real culprits — the dams and the nets and the fishing industry — to continue to drive the salmon toward extinction. And yet, officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service are poised to do just that. They will be releasing their decision, any day now, as to what to do about the salmon. And, almost certainly, they will be blaming the sea lions. They will cave in to pressures from the fishing industry and from the Bonneville Power Administration, and will ignore the real causes of the salmon crisis. They will issue a decree lamenting that they have “no other choice” in the matter but to recommend the killing of C404 and dozens of other sea lions. In order to… “save the salmon.”

We know this is bullshit, and they know this is bullshit. But to them, this is a political game. To C404, and to me, this is a matter of life and death.

In the battle over the salmon and the sea lions, it has been necessary for those who want easy answers to engage in a lot of symbolic politics. The law is clear that marine mammals are to be protected and not shot, and so those who want to go around that law have been required to jump through a series of hoops to demonstrate (no matter how disingenuously) just how “thoughtful” they have been. To that end, a task force of 18 “experts” was convened, in order to give an air of “science” to the effort to rubber-stamp their proposal. In January, right on cue, that task force voted 17 to one, that the “solution” to the salmon crisis is to kill sea lions. Unsurprisingly, most of this task force was composed of lackeys and lobbyists for the commercial and tribal fishing industries. (Although, shockingly, one of the 17 to vote in favor of the killing was none other than Tony Vecchio, director of the Oregon Zoo. It’s hard to imagine how a man who makes his living pretending to care about animals could find it appropriate to support the killing of sea lions. One wonders how large a gift he, or the Oregon Zoo, may have received from the fishing and/or the power industry for his short-sightedness. Maybe he should hear from you.)

(You can reach Tony by contacting the Oregon Zoo. Here is their website: http://www.oregonzoo.org/Animals/main.htm. Bizarrely enough, when I went to this site, I was greeted by a photograph of a sea lion somersaulting in the water, with the headline “Sea lions are playful marine mammals.” How odd.)

What these officials are asking for now is the right to drive both species, both the salmon and the sea lion, to extinction in order to avoid having to deal with the real cause of the crisis. The fishing industry wants to keep on killing salmon for profit, no matter how catastrophic that is to the sustainability of the last remaining runs. The Bonneville Power Administration wants to keep on blocking the waters of the Columbia and her tributaries with massive dams, no matter how many fish they kill. And the National Marine Fisheries Service wants an easy, even if ineffective and pointless, answer that does not piss off powerful interests. Make no mistake about this. If the Marine Mammal Protection Act is breached in this way, it will mean wholesale destruction of the sea lions, as well as the salmon. Because they will not be stopping with “up to 85 sea lions per year,” as they are now asking to kill. This number, while devastating to those of us who know and love the sea lions, is only the tip of the ice berg. As I mentioned above, the salmon populations are crashing all over the planet. If they get away with this here, it’s only a matter of time before they seek permission to do the same on rivers all up and down the West coast. And, since the officials who proposed the 85 sea lion number have admitted that this will not be enough to make a difference in the salmon populations, but it is all that they felt was politically acceptable at the time, it will only be another matter of time before they begin calling for more, and more sea lion blood. What they want, is to dismantle the Marine Mammal Protection Act all together.

The one, lone voice of reason on the so-called “Pinniped-Fishery Interaction Task Force” belonged to Sharon Young, who was also, coincidentally enough, one of the only members of the panel who was *not* connected to the fishing industry. Young is the Marine Issues Field Director for the Humane Society of the United States. (Along with Portland’s own NW In Defense of Animals, the Humane Society of the United States is one of the very few animal rights groups to rise to this occasion. I have a new sense of respect, admiration, and gratitude for both of these organizations, and I would urge anyone who cares about this issue to share your appreciation with them both. You can find out more about the HSUS here: link to www.hsus.org.)

Unlike the many panelists who make their living lobbying for the fishing industry, and the spineless Mr. Vecchio, Sharon Young actually has a great deal of expertise on the subject of sea lions and other marine mammals. She, alone, had the courage and the compassion to cast the one dissenting vote against the proposal to kill sea lions. And she, alone, authored the Bonneville Minority Report. In it, she details how the proposal to kill sea lions is flawed, how the facts clearly show that sea lions are not to blame for the salmon crisis, and how those same facts demonstrate that killing sea lions is not a solution and will not help the salmon. She points out that human predation is far more damaging to the salmon than sea lion predation, and notes that the National Marine Fisheries Service nevertheless considers the level of human predation to be “acceptable.” Of special note, in this report, is the fact that the salmon runs in both the spring and the fall show similar patterns of fluctuation and decline in their numbers. Yet the sea lions are only on the Columbia in the spring, and do not effect the fall runs. Therefore, it must be …some other factor… that is causing the decline. The blame cannot be placed upon the sea lions if the same crisis is occurring in the fall runs. Here is an excerpt from this report:

“Material provided to the task force allowed the task force to compare the decline and/or recovery of salmon stocks in the spring that are potentially affected by predation to the decline and/or recovery of salmon stocks in the fall which are not subject to predation because sea lions are not present in the river during that time of year. A chart entitled ‘Total Annual Salmonid Counts at Bonneville Dam 1988-2007,’ shows similar run trajectories for both fall and spring run Chinook. That is, both the fall and spring runs show fluctuations in their populations that spike and fall in similar time frames and the run sizes in 2006 for both runs are not substantially different from their starting points in 1988. In addressing the difference between recovery trends of fall and spring run salmon, a memo to the task force from Guy Norman of WDFW states ‘The difference in status could not be attributed to pinniped predation.’”

Everyone on that panel had access to these facts, but everyone other than Young chose to ignore them. You can read her full report here: http://www.hsus.org/web-files/PDF/marine_mammals/bonneville_minority_report.pdf.

I spoke with Young recently about this issue. Passionate and committed to the animals, she pointed out that the government cannot even provide a firm estimate of how many salmon are likely to be saved by killing sea lions. “At the same time that the states propose to kill sea lions for eating 4% of the spring runs, they will allow fishermen to kill up to 12% of the run,” she said. “They make no attempt to justify why 4% predation merits a death sentence but a fishing quota three times that high is just fine.” (And, indeed, as Young points out in the Bonneville Minority Report, if one takes into account the “incidental” catch of thousands of Chinook salmon in the ocean, the number of salmon killed by humans associated with the fishing industry is much, much higher. If one considers all of the salmon killed by the dams, the number rises higher still. Again, I urge anyone who wants to understand this issue better to read that report. You can access it at the link given above.)

“This isn’t about choosing sea lions over salmon,” Young said. “This proposal is just scapegoating natural predators for human-related actions that have caused the declines in the salmon. Until we remedy the real problems, killing sea lions won’t save the fish.”

John Balzar, also with the Humane Society of the United States, agrees. In a recent editorial in the Seattle Times, Balzar stated, “When the government gets ready to kill predators in a desperate effort to save prey, you can be sure that something’s way wrong in nature. And these days, what’s wrong can usually be traced to human mistakes.” Further, he noted, “The real choice is not salmon or sea lions, it’s whether to act wisely and increase salmon numbers or whether to add another management mistake to the long record of them while the fish are left to struggle.”

Indeed.

It would seem that the National Marine Fisheries Service is aware of this as well, in spite of their recent efforts to scapegoat sea lions. In a 1999 press release, they stated the following quite clearly: “People – not nature – have created the conditions that have affected the health of these fish. The endangered species listings are the result of such factors as land-use and water-development projects that degrade watershed and stream conditions critical to salmon survival, habitat loss, over-harvesting, dam construction and operation, and certain hatchery practices.” Given this rather unequivocal statement, it’s not likely that they just don’t know who is really to blame for the salmon crisis. Rather, they just do not want to inconvenience any of their more powerful supporters over it. (You can read this press release in its entirety here: http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases99/mar99/noaa99r115.html.)

If you care about the salmon or the sea lions, it is time for you to act. It takes courage and the power of will to stand up for the animals. If you have that courage, please use it now. Start by emailing Dr. James Balsiger ( Jim.Balsiger@noaa.gov ) who is the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Tell him that you understand that NMFS is about to release their decision regarding the Columbia river sea lions, and ask him to do the right thing and deny permission to kill sea lions. Write to Governor Kulongoski of Oregon and Governor Gregoire of Washington to demand clemency for the sea lions.

Kulongoski can be reached here:

160 State Capitol
900 Court Street
Salem, Oregon 97301-4047
PHONE
Governor’s Citizens’ Representative Message Line
503.378.4582
FAX
503.378.6827

Gregoire can be reached here:

Governor Chris Gregoire
Office of the Governor
PO Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002

Give Governor Gregoire’s Office a Call:
Governor’s Office (360) 902-4111
For relay operators for the deaf or hearing impaired, please dial 7-1-1

Fax Governor Gregoire a Letter:
(360) 753-4110

They need to hear from you. Using your voice is a necessary first step. And be ready. Because this could be a fight on our hands. But we’re up to this battle. We have stood up for the animals before, here in Cascadia. Together, we have fought against breed-specific legislation that would have led to the murder of countless pit bulls, we have ended cruel hunting and trapping practices (though we have many more to go on this one), we have made it illegal to force animals to fight to the death for human entertainment, and we kicked Schumacher’s asses out of Portland. Together, we are strong. We can do this. If we stand together, we can save these sea lions. We can save C404. And if we save C404, we will also be saving countless other sea lions from lethal force. We will be forcing the National Marine Fisheries Service to seriously consider the role of human predation in the salmon crisis. We will be demanding that they comply with the law, and address the real problem that is causing the salmon to disappear out of the waters of the earth. If we stand up now for these beings, we will be saving both the salmon AND the sea lions.