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Why do we owe them a living?

22K views 192 replies 70 participants last post by  joe_camo 
#1 Ā·
So at one point in history there was commercial duck hunting.

Thousands and thousands of birds brought down with what were essentially cannons. Like 4 gauge guns mounted on wheels.

Entire flocks hammered at once.

The impact on waterfowl populations serious and grave.

And at one point commercial harvest was outlawed.

Yet sport hunters are still allowed.

I listened to a guy give pro gillnet testimony and I kept hearing the position like somehow commercial fishermen are owed an existence on the river.

Why?

Why are they owed a living?

Maybe the reality is, they need to go the way of the commercial duck hunters.



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#4 Ā·
Even if you don't buy fish or fish products harvested by them - if you're fishing the columbia basin, you get to pay them via that stupid endorsement. Let them troll the ocean with long lines and barbless hooks, and only keep the first XXX of fish they catch, fin or no fin. Short season, reasonable quota. The handful of commercial license holders get the lions share of the harvestable quota, which is horsehockey. Tens of thousands of license holders between Oregon and Washington, yet a handful of people get to pillage the runs and sporties get the scraps, and we get to subsidize their welfare, and they got Youngs Bay closed to all angling just to give them more of a leg up.

I'd be fine if that $10 went to a job training program, if any of those guys was actually making their living by fishing the C. They're not - and I don't feel like paying another tax to fund people with an entitlement mentality. They feel entitled to the bulk of the hatchery run, they feel entitled to put gill nets in our river and hoover up a public resource that gets paid for by the tax payers and sport anglers, which is then packaged up and sold elsewhere by in large.

We get to pay for hatcheries - so they get to reap the benefits. Unfair doesn't begin to describe the situation.
 
#5 Ā·
Many many years ago there were ice salesmen that made their living from selling ice to residents with iceboxes in their kitchens, eventually refrigerators overtook the market and the ice salesman were no longer needed. Do you think that all those ice salesman went broke and never worked again? Nope, they adapted and moved on. So now why do we have to worry about a small group of businessman/fisherman that can't adapt to changing times? I'm a struggling small business owner and I don't look for handouts from the government, why should these individuals be any different?

Just my :twocents:
 
#6 Ā·
11 Jobs That No Longer Exist Today

Back in the day, there were jobs to do just about everything. You could be paid to reset the pins at a bowling alley or knock on peopleā€™s windows to wake them up.

1. Bowling Alley Pinsetter
Bowling alley pinsetters were small children, employed by bowling alleys to set up the pins after each bowler. These noisy, laborious jobs typically paid very little.

2. Human Alarm Clock
These folks were commonly called ā€œknocker-uppersā€. They would walk a set route, rapping on the windows of their clients with long sticks, throwing pebbles, and shouting at the top of their lungs, to make sure they woke up on time for their jobs.

3. Ice Cutter
Before the invention of the refrigerator, the best way to keep things cool was to harvest ice in the winter, and store it for use through the warmer months of the summer. This job fell to ice-cutters. They had the dangerous assignment of carving frozen ponds and lakes into giant blocks of ice and lifting them from the frigid waters, risking death by hypothermia if they fell in.

4. Pre-radar Listeners For Enemy Aircraft
Soon after airplanes were invented, armies around the world adapted methods for detecting the sound of engines approaching on the horizon. Before we had radar detection, we relied on sensitive ears and amplified sound waves. Upon hearing an enemy aircraft approaching, these listeners would sound the alarm.

5. Rat Catchers
When Europe was suffering from massive rat infestations, this job was a booming career option. Rats were often carriers of disease, and they risked getting sick from bites, but their job was an important public service.

6. Lamp Lighter
Before electric lamps were introduced to most cities, street lamps were fueled by gas, and lamplighters would walk the streets at dusk to set flame to these street lights.

7. Milkman
Without refrigeration, milk will spoil within a day. Thatā€™s why the milk man was an ever present occupation, making daily deliveries, right up until the advent of the fridge.

8.Log Drivers
Back before highways and railways, the absolute best way to transport lumber from the forest to the mill was to float it down the river, guided by log drivers.

9. Switchboard Operator
The routing of todayā€™s millions of simultaneous phone calls all happens digitally. Not that long ago, these calls were all handled manually, by countless switchboard operators, literally connecting wire to wire.

10. Resurrectionist
In the early days of modern medicine, doctors at universities and hospitals has to essentially resort to graver-robbing, hiring ā€œresurrectionistsā€ to body-snatch cadavers for experimentation and study.

11. Lector Who Entertained Factory Workers
Ever listen to a podcast or audiobook while doing repetitive work? Factory workers used to hire live ā€œlectorsā€ to read works of literature to them while they worked, sometimes pooling their money together to pay for them. Occasionally these lectors read labor-organizing materials, leading to an increase in unions and collective bargaining.
 
#8 Ā·
The answer is, because Kitz offered it up.

I wish someone would have offered to pay my lost income from federal regulations. 6 figures a year gross for me (I am a smaller operation. The big outfits were 30-40 million a year gross).

Nobody was handed anything. It simply went away.
 
#9 Ā·
Looking at their Facebook pages, it appears that the argument they're gearing up for is that sport fishermen don't want the public to be able to eat salmon unless they catch it themselves. They're going to try to get the people who buy salmon at Safeway and Fred Meyer to think that if gillnetting is banned on the Columbia, they won't be able to have salmon for dinner anymore.
 
#12 Ā·
Big Picture: We plant the river with hatchery fish to somehow make up for the fact that we commercially over harvested the fish to near extinction, logged the trib habitat and ran their progeny through a hydro plant.

We found that the hatchery fish were inferior to the fish that managed to survive in the wild to the point that a wild fish spawning with a hatchery fish produced no offspring. In effect, every such spawning reduced the possibility of more wild fish. Dang...

It was determined that hatchery fish could not be allowed to spawn with wild fish if we were ever going to have healthy wild populations. That meant that there needs to be a method to remove the hatchery fish we planted*. The ODFW has seen in-river commercial harvest by gill net as the answer to that conundrum. Gill nets and netters became quasi-contractors acting as a management tool, doing the ODFW's work removing excess hatchery fish.

So, we have developed a group of commercial fishermen who only harvest, never plant, and who feel entitled to the mission since they have been coddled as a tool of fisheries management.

If we waved the magic wand tomorrow and all commercial fishing was verboten on the river we would still need a method to remove excess hatchery fish or we will lose the hatchery fish plantings. They cost the government a lot of money and this is not a good time to cost the government money.

Could sports fishermen remove enough hatchery fish to achieve management goals? The folks at ODFW think not.

*If we could improve the hatchery product to the point that they were viable reproductively we wouldn't have this problem.
 
#14 Ā·
Big Picture: We plant the river with hatchery fish to somehow make up for the fact that we commercially over harvested the fish to near extinction, logged the trib habitat and ran their progeny through a hydro plant.

We found that the hatchery fish were inferior to the fish that managed to survive in the wild to the point that a wild fish spawning with a hatchery fish produced no offspring. In effect, every such spawning reduced the possibility of more wild fish. Dang...

It was determined that hatchery fish could not be allowed to spawn with wild fish if we were ever going to have healthy wild populations. That meant that there needs to be a method to remove the hatchery fish we planted*. The ODFW has seen in-river commercial harvest by gill net as the answer to that conundrum. Gill nets and netters became quasi-contractors acting as a management tool, doing the ODFW's work removing excess hatchery fish.

So, we have developed a group of commercial fishermen who only harvest, never plant, and who feel entitled to the mission since they have been coddled as a tool of fisheries management.

If we waved the magic wand tomorrow and all commercial fishing was verboten on the river we would still need a method to remove excess hatchery fish or we will lose the hatchery fish plantings. They cost the government a lot of money and this is not a good time to cost the government money.

Might help if we weren't limited to one or two fish a day.

Just a wild thought but what if hatcheries were removed, commercial gillnets were removed...seines only so the remaining hatchery fish selectively harvested. Problem solved? Isn't that what we're currently trying to do? My concern is that hatchery fish have intermingled with wild fish for so long, have there been any studies or research that concludes without question that there are actually any "wild" fish remaining?

Commercial fishermen on the Columbia River almost wiped out the salmon runs years ago...do we just let history repeat itself?
 
#15 Ā·
Ms O, in a nutshell, they found that hatchery fish are changed by the hatchery environment but change back if they are able to produce in the wild. It is reversible.

These fish are highly adaptive.

Just a wild thought but what if hatcheries were removed, commercial gillnets were removed...seines only so the remaining hatchery fish selectively harvested. Problem solved?
All that would be required is step one of your proposal.
 
#34 Ā·
This is I how see it, except for the fact that sports were FORCED to change the method immediately. The commercial fleet has been given adequate time and MONEY to prepare for the changes! I for one am not giving them one more cent until they are forced to change to the agreed terms. Guess I'll be eating trout for awhile.....:doh:
 
#104 Ā·
Or cut trees for your lumber or fire wood? Just other natural resources we hire someone else to collect for us. Don't get me wrong, I do not like gill nets one bit, but are we saying we only want commercial harvest of natural resources stopped on resources WE want more for us?
 
#21 Ā·
"Why do we owe them a living?"

We don't. We also don't owe manufacturing jobs to middle America. In trying to replace what's been lost, we're going to either rev up epic inflation or start a trade war that could push us into a depression ala Smoot-Hawley. But I digress......

We should do right by the fish, sporties and commercials. Sporties provide a lot more economic input...........
 
#22 Ā·
The money makers it would seem, are the brokers and merchants. This is where the true political push is imo. Buckmaster wants to sell his hatchery pellets, the Astoria group wants to export our Columbia Chinook at crazy prices.

I am not so sure the guys working the boats are anywhere near the income levels of the few big players. My opinion.
 
#23 Ā·
The public owes the commercials nothing. They are a bunch of takers and do not contribute to the enhancement and building up of their so called "business". It is corporate welfare.
My favorite expression is "if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem". OUR salmon were being depleted long before the dams. More recently, our sturgeon fishery was healthy and stable, until the gill netters got involved. Now they divert the blame to sea lions, instead their numbers started to dwindle after the commercials were allowed.
Instead of "building up their business", like the Native Americans, over the years they simply target another "less marketable" species.
They are not only part of the problem, but they have practiced a "scorched earth" policy.
Look how the fisheries have rebounded once these cry babies have been taken off of the rivers.
We owe them no apologies.
Thanks for letting me vent.
 
#24 Ā·
This question alone, "why do we owe X a job" is too loaded in my view. I can (and do) make the same argument about Virginia coal mining, and old growth logging to name a few. I think the question is what is the ethical balance of harvest for these Columbia mainstrm salmon. The gill nets non selective nature is both unethical and against the interest of wild salmon and steelhead recovery.
 
#26 Ā·
We are virtually unanimous in our desire to remove gill nets from the Columbia, wherever they might kill native salmon.
I think we are on a slow train to achieving our goal, but I don't understand why some think that the gill netters should agree with us. The BIG PICTURE to them is the tens of thousands of dollars they have in equipment, and their family member's ability to prosper. They're not evil men and women.
We owe them nothing, but a little empathy for their loss of a way of life wouldn't hurt.
 
#27 Ā·
Manipulators (politicians/lobbyists) love empathy . . because they will twist it into putting words in your mouth that . . you really agree with them. If you let these folks pull on your heart strings, then they feel emboldened to push harder until you cave in . . after all, you agreed . . you feel for them, so don't be so hard on them. And that turns into . . let's just get back to the way it was before.

No chance.
 
#29 Ā·
From the first actions to regulate/ban gillnets from the LCR, gillnetters have used the same tactic, and that's perception, it has been very successful and the best part is you don't need facts.
 
#73 Ā·
Hey let us not forget that Jesus was a Gill Netter.

I love this considering they were cast netting and purse seining in the Bible.
Sorry but that is not correct.......

Jesus returns to His home town and this what the people say:

Mark 6:3
3 Isnā€™t this the carpenter? Isnā€™t this Maryā€™s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Arenā€™t his sisters here with us?ā€ And they took offense at him.

He was a carpenter or a builder. Not a fishermen. Some of His disciples were fishermen.
 
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