Replies

If you have seals or sea lions in Puget Sound, then you have Great Whites. Since the ban on shooting "water varmints" (aka seals) the number of shark attacks off the oregon coast has risen. The seals also consume huge quantities of "endangered salmon". I guess it's ok if a predator eats those salmon though, God forbid if an angler that pays money to the state for a license can catch and eat one.

I support the ban on shooting seals. If people hunted them for food, I could accept that. But self-appointed vigilantes shooting them because they eat fish is just as wacked as the eco-terrorists who think we can't take fish either. A harbor seal washed up on our beach once, shot in the head, and it made my blood boil.

We have both a healthy salmon population and a healthy seal population. We can watch them out front every day. What a treat. We have a couple of pods of killer whales that make their rounds through every year. I am happy to have them all. Seals are not varmints, they are part of the world we live in.

I don't buy the native versus hatchery fish nonsense. There are more fish returning to the hatcheries than ever. I think we can support them all here. I agree we have to be smarter, and stop the practice of pretending hatchery fish don't count. They are the same dang fish, from the same dang river, as the "wild fish".