Oregon Tortures, Slaughters Sea Lions So People Can Catch Fish

     Sea lions are the constant companions of vessels in harbors and coastal areas across the West Coast of the United States. They are gentle creatures, more bark than bite, with complex social systems. They are mothers and fathers like you and I, feeding their youth with milk to foster another generation of successful marine mammals. Contrast this to the scene that has played out in Oregon and Washington over the past decade. Men and women lacking the skills for actual jobs capture the animals, lock them in metal bars akin to those used to rape cows, sear the flesh of the animals with a number, the stench of burned skin and fur mixing with blood smoking through the air. The animals cry in agony... and are released. That's when the monitoring begins. It's almost like baseball... three strikes, and you're out. The only difference is that, for the poor pinnipeds, striking out is punished with a bullet to the brain, and the strikes are recorded any time they are observed... eating fish. 

     What else is a sea lion supposed to do? Starve, according to the eminent fisheries biologists sucking the public tit for the Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service. And it's not just sea lions. Their neighbors, the cormorants, are also shot. If they're "lucky," they'll simply be forced from their habitat with sounds not unlike a mortar shot or have their eggs and nests smothered with corn oil. The irony of it all is that the chief execution chambers for wildlife are at dams, among those ultimate symbols of human destruction of the natural world, including salmon. In fact, the Snake River Dams are a primary reason for the decline in salmon in the Puget Sound, and, therefore, the Southern Resident Killer Whales.

     The dams themselves are devastating, as is the commercial fishing industry and aquaculture industry, which is pillaging and poisoning the salmon and their habitat. Still, sea lions and seabirds, which have lived in harmony with the natural world for time immemorial, are scapegoated. Why? Because it is convenient; it requires humans change nothing, and, as a result the salmon die at the same rate and the sea lions and cormorants suffer. Several culls have been successfully prevented, but a multiannual effort by authorities beginning in 2011 wiped out 468 sea lions and 17,000 cormorants at Bonneville Dam in Washington and Oregon. Starting in 2019, authorities marked 920 animals for slaughter in the Columbia River, which is set to continue until 2023. The fishing industry supports this effort, the political pundits say? Of course they do, dipshits. They are not stewards of anything. Humans have consistently demonstrated only the ability to harm the planet and heal it at a moderate pace sometimes when a cute enough animals is being wiped out.

     Isn't this illegal? Not at all! The Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits the killing, injuring, or harassment of all marine mammals-- porpoises, dolphins, whales, seals-- except for an exemption that allows authorities to cull sea lions. Nobody seems to notice, and, if they did, most wouldn't care. If a sea lion is burned and shot in the waters of Cascadia, does it make a sound? Few know: those who inflict this pain must not have been born with a soul, and those who document it and attempt to stop it surely lose it after bearing witness to torture. If you eat salmon, you have the blood of thousands of sea lions already killed and yet to be killed on your hands.