Gunning for Sea Lions Misses Mark on Salmon Recovery

The House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries held an oversight hearing in December entitled “Sea Lion Predation in the Pacific Northwest.” While several members of Congress and witnesses claimed that expanding the killing of pinnipeds is necessary to save endangered salmon, others were aligned with AWI’s position that the lethal take of pinnipeds for salmon recovery in the Columbia River Basin is ineffective at recovering salmon populations and does not address the fact that the best available science indicates that the salmon decline is primarily due to human-caused factors. These include dams and culverts that create migration bottlenecks and degrade spawning habitat, industrial salmon fisheries, and non-native fish introduced for sport fishing. When viewed against these cumulative stressors, pinniped predation is a comparatively minor contributor to overall salmon mortality. Killing predators is merely a way to avoid culpability while taking aim at an easier target—thus repeating a strategy that has already failed to deliver conservation benefits.

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