Gordon wrote:
Why is it a good thing to eat wild commercially caught salmon and a bad
thing to eat farmed salmon?
Here in Washington State, we spend millions to enhance streams, reverse
erosion, stop cows from peeing in creeks, etc to save dwindling stocks of
wild salmon and at the same time, conservationists tell us to eat wild fish
only! What the ^%$&?
And while I'm at it, why do people go nuts when there is a minor sewage
spill yet the city of Victoria Canada can dump 34 million gallons of
untreated sewage per DAY into the Straits of Juan de Fuca with no adverse
effects?
Gordon


Fish farming in estuaries like Puget Sound is environmentally
destructive.

In nature, a school of salmon travels through miles of ocean every day
and is not restricted to swimming in the same water it fouls with its
waste. This is rather obviously not true with fish raised in very
crowded conditions in a pen. In nature, the salmon are able to take
food from the surrounding waters (schools of bait fish, etc), and again
this is not true in a pen situation. The seafloor becomes so
contaminated under a salmon pen that the normal sea life is either
altered in consist or dies out entirely for large areas surrounding the
pen. Commercial "fish food" must be fed to the farmed fish, and as the
uneaten chunks of this stuff settle into the water and rots it promotes
the growth of algae, etc.

Holmes Harbor, on Whidbey Island, is an excellent example. My parent
lived there for a while, and when they moved in the beaches in the
harbor were clean and clamming was pretty good in certain sections.
After a couple of fish farms set up shop, the beaches eventually became
covered with green slime and algae and clamming went straight to heck.

Fish farms are forced to use a lot of medication to prevent the spread
of disease among the unnaturally dense and confined schools of fish,
and this medication finds its way into the meat much the same way that
growth hormones show up in beef and milk, etc.

Finally, most of the fish farms in the Pacific NW raise Atlantic
salmon, which are not native to the NW. When these fish escape, (and
some always manage to escape), they
compete with native stocks for available food. If any of the escaped
farm fish eventually went upstream to spawn...(maybe not all that
likely because salmon typically return to the stream where they were
hatched)...they would compete for opportunities to mate with the
dominant native species but would be genetically unable to produce
offspring.

Seen on a bumper sticker: Help Stamp out Dangerous Drugs, Refuse to Eat
Farmed Fish.