Fishery Management or Pre-Meditated Animal Cruelty
I am a commercial snapper grouper fisherman that never wants to fish again if I am going to be forced to discard most of what I catch. Research shows that up to 90% of discarded fish die slowly from stress, infection, and decompression damage. As of March 3, 2011 all bottom fishing in federal waters from Virginia to Key West must be done with circle hooks. Circle hooks break a fishes jaw if they are not removed properly. Those poor fish slowly starve to death. The law that mandated these hooks also forces fishermen to discard every Red Snapper we catch. The fishery managers planned ahead to fill the entire Red Snapper quota with fish that have been tortured to death and wasted. This pre-meditated fish abuse is just the latest atrocity fishermen are forced through the barrel of a gun to commit.
The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) also created derby fisheries for commercial fishermen by refusing to wisely manage the unnecessarily low quotas with proper Trip Poundage Limits (TPLs). This leads to long closures that require fishermen to discard any illegal fish we accidentally catch while fishing for legal species. The derby fisheries not only mandate the waste of our resources. They severely cut our income while greatly increasing our chances of injury or death because we have to stay at sea longer and in worse weather to catch enough legal fish. The long closures also restrict the public’s access to a dependable supply of safe American seafood. The proper use of TPLs would solve these problems by allowing fishermen to keep a set amount of each species during a trip. This would keep our fisheries open for most of the year.
The SAFMC’s first instance of long-term animal abuse was when they came up with size limits. They may sound good in theory, but have many unintended consequences. Size limits force fishermen to target the breeding stock while discarding the fish that haven’t lived long enough to reach some arbitrary length. Many of those young fish die after being held firm enough to remove the hook and measure it. Their protective slime gets wiped off, exposing them to infection. Their gills are often damaged while trying to hold the struggling fish. Their mouths are damaged by removing the hook, especially a circle hook. The simple solution is to remove all size limits and replace them with reasonable possession limits.
It makes me sick to be forced by bad laws to torture, kill, and waste so many fish. Would this government mandated animal abuse be allowed to continue if we could see the fish suffering? Would the American people support laws that caused countless squirrels, rabbits, deer, and other animals on land to be wounded and forced to stagger around until death finally ended their suffering? We should not allow this to continue just because we cannot witness the cruelty.
The removal of size limits along with reasonable possession limits would almost eliminate regulatory discards. Fishermen could make wise use of every fish landed. We could collect accurate data to use in credible stock assessments. The quotas wouldn’t need to be reduced to plan ahead for thousands of fish to be tortured to death and wasted.
Einstein said. “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” I pray this brief summary of a tragic problem has defined it well enough to motivate people to demand an end to some of the worst cases of government mandated long-term pre-meditated animal cruelty in human history.
Sincerely,
Chris Mccaffity
