The NY Times Green Blog posted an article, “Smarting Over Cod Shortages, Fishermen Blame Seals,” that caught my attention. Last year, the Canadian Fisheries Dept. considered the idea to cull 73,000 gray seals from an estimated population of 350,000 in order to help resurrect their struggling cod fishery. According to an article in Canada’s National Post, the grey seal population doubles every ever 7 years and adult seals can reach a full-grown weight of 500 lbs. Marc Surette, executive director of the Nova Scotia Fish Packers Association points out they at their adult size, gray seals “eat more fish than any fleet could possibly take.”

But Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of Canada doesn’t agree that the gray seals should take all of the blame and points out in the NY Times article:

“Seals and codfish co-existed for millennia. That shows that the problem lies elsewhere.”

Ms. Aldworth then points to “overfishing, by catch from other fisheries and damage to cod spawning grounds from offshore oil exploration” as a possible cause of the cod fishery collapse.

It’s no different here in the Pacific NW; we’ve been blaming sea lions for the drop in salmon stocks for years rather than taking responsibility for development around critical spawning grounds and over-fishing. And more recently, people have been taking action against the sea lions as 7 were recently found shot dead around the Puget Sound.

As our resources dwindle and our population booms, are we headed toward more of this? Speciesism? I hope not because we’re getting closer to the Aztecs and their sacrifice ceremonies meant to keep the sun rising and universe happy. Looking at it today, the idea that cutting out a person’s heart would somehow control the solar system sounds asinine. I hope we don’t have to look back at knee-jerk ideas like clubbing thousands of gray seals for cod fillets the same way we look back at the crazy stuff the Aztecs did. But wait a second, maybe we’re already doing this. [National Post via NY Times]