The Humane Society of the United States, Wild Fish Conservancy, and two individual citizens filed suit today in federal court in Oregon, seeking to stop the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) from authorizing the killing of as many as 425 sea lions at Bonneville Dam over the next five years. NMFS concluded that sea lions must be killed to prevent them from consuming an average of 0.4 to 4.2 percent of salmon and steelhead returns this year, even though both Oregon and Washington state recently proposed to increase fishing quotas by 33 percent (from 9 to 12 percent of the run) in light of expected record Chinook salmon returns for 2008.
"Federal law only allows the killing of sea lions when the agency proves they are having a significant negative impact on salmon," said Jonathan R. Lovvorn, vice president for animal protection litigation for The HSUS. "The National Marine Fisheries Service's decision to kill hundreds of native marine mammals to reduce salmon losses by a couple of percentage points, while simultaneously increasing harvest quotas for fishermen, is both outrageous and patently illegal."
Although the States will begin with the trapping and removal of about a dozen animals, the plan also calls for hundreds of animals to be shot over the next several years. The government's own environmental analysis states that they will be unlikely to trap more than 15 animals each year, and will quickly have to resort to killing animals in order to reach their goal of reducing sea lion taking from 4 percent to 1 percent of the run
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