Living with Animals

Humans v. Sea Lions v. Salmon: A Lose, Lose, Lose Situation

by Sarah at ProgressiveKid

It’s official: Fish & Wildlife officials are getting ready to kill sea lions in the Columbia River because the sea lions are killing salmon, and we like salmon better than sea lions. (Salmon: Good. Sea lions: Bad.) FYI: We humans are killing salmon too, but thankfully the sea lions aren’t coming after us yet. The problem is that salmon are endangered (mostly because of us) and the sea lions are really good at consuming ginormous quantities of them all at once, threatening salmon even more.

In 2008, the Humane Society and two other plaintiffs filed suit to stop the National Marine Fisheries Service from giving the green light to the killing of as many as 425 sea lions at the dam over a five-year period. The Humane Society lost their suit but have filed an appeal that should be heard in the late summer.

Evolution Convolution

I don’t want the salmon to disappear any more than the folks at F&W do. But, as is so often the case, the human solution to this human-caused problem is to create a problem for someone else, either a human of less power or a nonhuman species. Humans get all mixed up about causes and solutions and justify their stinky behavior (overfishing, sea lion killing) with seemingly altruistic reasoning (feed people, save the salmon). The fact is that the sea lions aren’t more predatory than we are. In 2008, the year of the Humane Society lawsuit, Oregon and Washington, two of the states through which the Columbia River runs, increased their fishing quotas by 33 percent (from 9 to 12 percent of the run). Salmon aren’t endangered because of sea lions but because of human overfishing.

The sea lions are simply on to something really good. And they, like crows and rats and mosquitoes, are figuring out how to survive in an increasingly difficult, human-riddled world. The sea lions know that, by hanging out below the Bonneville Dam (note: a human construction), they can stuff their bellies full of thousands of fat, shiny fish who are just waiting their turn to climb the human-built fish ladder along the dam.

So what we’re doing here is punishing the ones who are finding ways to survive in a world that we have made unfriendly to their survival. And the long-term effect of this type of strategy is that those best equipped to adapt and survive in a challenging environment are being handicapped to make their long-term survival less likely. This further alters an evolutionary process, favoring species that are not as well equipped and therefore less likely to make it in the long run.

If this were happening in a benign environment that favored diversity and the survival of a vast number of species, then it might not matter so much (except to the particular individuals involved). But when we are looking at a future world that is likely to be extremely impoverished in terms of its species diversity and sheer numbers of species representatives, why on earth would we be handicapping the most fit? We should instead be taking measures to cut back our own unsustainable consumption of salmon and using our human brains and great adaptability to figure out long-term sustainable food strategies for ourselves.

Us Versus Them

We humans refer to many adaptable, strong survivors as “predatory” or as “pests” or we call them “invasive, nonnative species.” But just about all species are nonnative if put in a broad geologic time frame, and what we are seeing with invasive nonnative species is simply evolution, as assisted by human behavior, in action. And just about anything other than us that survives well we think of as troublesome or pesky.

Should you yank the ivy out of your yard since it will eventually kill the Indian plum and Douglas fir or should you leave it for the towhees who now use it for shelter? Should you pull out the “nonnative” blackberries that are choking out native blackberries or leave the bushes to provide habitat to the rabbits now populating the park after their pet ancestors were dumped there by humans? Is it sensible to kill the clever sea lion for joining in on what we have already started? The answers to any questions like these are difficult to come by. There is no one right way to answer them, but any answers must be reached only after careful consideration of all of the effects, good and bad, and of all the affected, whether human or not. They certainly cannot be determined through clouded thinking, including that which hypocritically levels accusations at the wrong ones or misreads causes and effects, such as the thinking behind the Bonneville Dam decision.

The goose who poops on the soccer field, the seagulls crowding the beach, the crow who steals the children’s lunches: These are likely our future companions. We are already doing in the last of so many weaker, less adaptable species. It makes no sense for us also to wipe out the ones who are hanging on with us.

Image by woodleywonderworks, 2008, Creative Commons license.

©2009 ProgressiveKid