TRAPPED SEA LIONS

First we attract the sea lions to the dam. They eat the salmon. Then they trap the sea lions to move them elsewhere. But then some think that too slow so they shoot the seals. Ah,the inhumanity of man.

The Lede – New York Times Blog
May 5, 2008,
Trapped Sea Lions Shot Dead in Oregon
By Anahad O’Connor

UPDATE: After close examination of the dead sea lions later in the week, officials changed their assessment of how they died, saying that something besides bullets had caused what were initially thought to be gunshot wounds. More in this post.

For years, the Bonneville Dam on the Oregon-Washington border has made life all too easy for the sea lions that congregate in the Columbia River just outside of Portland. Fish ladders in the dam create a bottleneck for salmon swimming upriver to spawning grounds, which allows sea lions to easily swoop in and dine on endangered salmon.

But now it’s the sea lions that have become the easy prey.

In an attempt to keep the sea lions from gorging on the salmon, state and federal authorities set up traps to humanely catch and remove them from the dam, to be shipped to zoos and wildlife parks. But over the weekend someone shot and killed six of the sea lions as they lay in the traps. According to the Associated Press, the animals were apparently shot in the middle of the night; their bodies were found around noon on Sunday.

Pinpointing the perpetrator will not be an easy task, because the Columbia River sea lions have been at the center of a long battle, and have a number of enemies. American Indian tribes in the area and others who fish the river for salmon have been pushing for months to get the federal government to set up regulations protecting the salmon and allowing lethal force to be used against the sea lions (themselves a protected species).

Even without the pesky sea lions, fishermen on the west coast have been having a tough year, so to protect the fish passing the dam, the National Marine Fisheries Service approved plans to kill or capture as many as 85 sea lions a year for five years. But the program was put on hold after the Humane Society of the United States challenged it in court. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled a hearing on the matter this week.

The Humane Society doesn’t like the killing part, but has gone along with capture. The sea lions trapped so far have been sent to Sea World parks in San Diego and San Antonio, a policy that some other animal-rights advocates are none too happy with, especially after one of the seven captured last month died in custody during a medical inspection. So the motive for the shooting might have been to sabotage the trapping program, rather than to take revenge for salmon-snatching: It’s not clear whether the trapping will continue now that the cages have become bulls’-eyes.

In any case, some commentators are noting that the Columbia River sea lions have a serious public relations problem and could stand to benefit from an image change.

Right now it looks like the sea lions can use all the help they can get.

For more info on this story, google sea lion blog and goto Lede, the blog for the New York Times.
Here is the web site: The Lede