They shoot sea lions to protect the salmon.
The sea lions’ crime: They eat salmon, their natural prey.
For ages there has been a cycle of predator species eating too many prey, prey declining, predator numbers crashing, prey recovering and so forth.
But no longer.
Now the National Marine Fisheries Service is in charge.
After first putting thousands of people out of work and decimating entire communities in the Northwest to supposedly protect the spotted owl, now they shoot barred owls to protect the spotted owls.
Here we have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service playing God.
The National Park Service will shoot hundreds of mountain goats in Olympic National Park to protect certain plants, even though the goats were here before the National Park was formed.
For billions of years evolution has led to the decline and demise of some species and the rise of others.
Now it appears that some bureaucrats think they have been anointed to choose winners and losers among species and freeze evolution in a year of their choosing.
Some 2.5 billion years ago, in the so-called Oxygen Holocaust, the introduction of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere led to the extinction of almost all anaerobic life forms.
This made way for oxygen-breathing species, including ourselves.
Had these self-styled environmentalists been around 2.5 billion years ago they would, no doubt, have mandated the eradication of oxygen-producing bacteria to protect anaerobic life, and oxygen-breathing life would never have been allowed to evolve on Earth.
Kaj Ahlburg,
Port Angeles