Wille Mitchell is an avid fisherman and like me, wants to see the environment protected so that the wild stocks have a chance to live on for generations. Kuterra farm is a great idea,takes the pressure off wild fish in a sustainable manner .But clearly your inference that the run of river project is paying for the fish farm 
??
Surely the capital cost is paid off over years of the profits from the product.
Well, it seems like making inferences and assumptions is kind of becoming a game here so I thought I would join in the fun.
The inference made by fish farm critics is that those that do not subscribe to their views on this must have financial interests in the BC fish farm industry and/or do not love wild salmon. Kind of a lame argument. Like Willie Mitchell, I am also is an avid fisherman who wants to see the environment protected so that the wild stocks have a chance to live on for generations. The difference is that I do not buy into these theories and correlations that apparently prove devastation by fish farms here in BC. Now Willie can skate the pants off of me on the ice and fire the puck much harder than I could ever do; however, with this issue feel very comfortable expressing my opinions and backing them up….and I have never spent one day working for the BC aquaculture industry.
My main criticism with opponents of fish farms is not their desire to have closed containment a reality; instead it is these theories and correlations they bring up which apparently prove that salmon farming how it is done now in BC is devastating wild salmon. For instance, let’s take the most prolific correlation fish farm opponents use which apparently show that Fraser Sockeye productivity started to decline as salmon farming in BC became more prominent after the early 90s. Well, if that’s the case then another correlation could be made to show that since the Alaskan Salmon hatchery program (i.e. salmon ranching) began to increase even more in the early 90s Fraser Sockeye productivity began to decrease throughout the 90s and the last decade. Instead, the billions of ranched salmon released annually by multiple countries in the North Pacific are viewed as a great example by many anti-fish farm activists as a shining example of good fisheries management. When Fraser Sockeye returns do not come in at the forecasted 50p level the fingers automatically get pointed at fish farming, but when returns are average or above then it is called an anomaly. It’s just not sea lice, but the way many fish farm critics talk about viruses and diseases - most of it is either exaggerated or not based on facts.
Lastly, in my opinion, many fish farm critics have a severe lack of knowledge of the wild salmon they profess to want to save. To me that would be sort of important. If people like Alexandra Morton, Don Staniford, D.C. Reid, Bob Chamberlain, and David Suzuki are going to start professing a love for Fraser Sockeye then they should start understanding some biology about them first. For instance, a photo of a “Chinook Salmon” got posted on the Salmon Are Sacred Facebook page. The poster not only called it a Chinook Salmon, but blamed the external wounds on the fish on salmon farms (surprise surprise). Well, as it was correctly pointed out, the fish was actually a Sockeye and those wounds on the carcass were likely the result of a predator. One would think that those dedicated to wild salmon would welcome this rather obvious correction and embrace fair comment, but instead the post was deleted. This leads me to my last criticism of fish farm opponents: They accused the last Federal government of muzzling scientists, but they seem to be also muzzling the message themselves. So much for transparency when they do not practice it themselves.
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Topic: Get your facts straight? (Read 1344128 times)