SallyRand

So, according to you, the financial bottom line takes precedence over the abusive and unnecessary killing of animals and the fish catch, which catch is already in danger from over-fishing?

got it

you will not be able to EAT those paper dollars when the fish catch truly goes to Hell.

oh wait

http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/cbio/cancod.html

From the citation:

"In 1992, the devestating collapse of the cod stocks off the east coast of Newfoundland forced the Canadian government to take drastic measures and close the fishery. Over 40,000 people lost there jobs. The communities are still struggling to recover. The marine ecosystem is still in a state of collapse.

The collapse of this vital and important fishery sounded a warning bell to governments around the world who were shocked that a relatively sophisticated, scientifically-based fisheries management program, not unlike their own, could have gone so wrong. The Canadian government had been warned by scientists and environmentalists that the cod stocks were overexploited and that there fleets were employing destructive fishing practices. The refused to significantly reduce quotas sighting the loss of jobs as too great a concern. The cost of their short term outlook and refusal to acknowledge ecological limits was devestating.
THE STORY

The ocean around the rocky shores of Newfoundland were once so full of cod that explorer John Cabot marveled in 1497 that they virtually blocked his ship. In the centuries to follow, fish became the one of the only reasons anyone ever came to Newfoundland, or stayed. Until the mid-twentieth century,

Canadians had traditionally fished mainly in waters relatively closer to shore, in small craft using traditional techniques such as traps, jigging from a dory, or small inshore gill-nets, longlines or small trawlers. They joined fishing boats from Spain and Portugal whose crews had also traditionally fished in the northwest Atlantic since before Newfoundland was colonized.

The most productive cod fishing area in the vast northwest Atlantic region was located off southern Labrador and to the east of Newfoundland where the highly productive population of "northern cod" had yielded an overall annual catch of about 250,000 tons for more than a century prior to the mid-1950s.
INVASION OF THE DISTANT-WATER FISHING FACTORIES

The northern cod fishery entered its boom-bust phase in the mid-1950s. It was then that Newfoundland's "banks" or "deep sea" schooner and dory fishery, which had been established in the late nineteen century, was displaced by a new breed of factory-fishing vessel.1 Modelled on the distant-water whaling factory ships, these new "factory trawlers" came from countries thousands of miles away in search of herring, haddock, flatfish, capelin, redfish, and, of course, the valuable northwest Atlantic cod. Up until the late 1970s these distant-water factory trawlers from Germany (East and West), Great Britain, Spain and Portugal, Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba and even from as far as east Asia had legally fished to within 12 miles of the eastern Canadian and New England (US) seaboards. They set and hauled their collosal nets from the stern, quickly processing and deep-freezing nearly all the fish they caught, working around the clock in all but the worst weather conditions.
DESTRUCTION OF THE NORTHERN COD

With the increased effort by distant-water fleets, catches of northern cod increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s and peaked at just over 800,000 tons by 1968.3 The distant-water fleet were subjecting the northern cod to intense, unprecedented fishing pressure, and by 1975 the declining northern cod population was insufficient to yield even 300,000 tonnes, while various species of hake, and other groundfish populations showed dramatic drops too. Canada (and the U.S.), concerned that stocks were being reduced to almost nothing, passed legislation in 1976 to extend their national jurisdictions over marine living resources out to 200 nautical miles. The "foreign" fishing fleets were banished to the "high seas".

Catches naturally declined after the departure of the foreigners to just 139,000 tonnes in 1978, which is probably the level where the federal government should have capped it then, and left it for many years, to give the stock the chance to recover. Instead, government and investors in fishing were, like the foreigners, thinking big. Soon, the stern factory-trawlers, or draggers as they became known, became the mainstay of Canada's Atlantic offshore fishing fleet, and the northern cod catch began a steady rise again as a result. By the mid-1980s, it was the Canadians who were landing more than 250,000 tonnes of northern cod annually.4
DESTRUCTIVE DRAGGER TECHNOLOGY

Massive investments poured into constructing these huge "draggers". Draggers haul enormous, baglike nets, as long as a football field, held open by a combination of huge steel plates or "doors" and heavy chains and rollers that plow and scrape the ocean bottom. They drag up whole schools of fish and anything else in the way, inflicting immense damage to immature target and non-target fish and the benthic (bottom-dwelling) community. They were not only destroying critical habitiat, but they also contributed to destabilizing the ecosystem of the northern cod.

The draggers targetted huge aggregations of cod while they were spawning, a time when the fish population is highly vulnerable to capture and to the physical impacts of the bottom-trawling gear on the environment. Detractors of the technology claim that the excessive trawling on spawning stocks became highly disruptive to the spawning process, negatively impacting the reproductive behaviour of the fish.5 In addition, the trawling activity is thought to result in a physical dispersion of eggs and milt leading to a higher fertilzation failure. Physical and chemical damage to larvae caused by the trawling action may also reduce their chances of survival.

The effect of selective fishing on spawning grounds - that is, selectively over-exploiting one species in an ecosystem -- can have disastrous effect on the feeding relationships in that ecosystem. This contributes to the overall reduction of spawning stock biomass of the targeted species, but also an increase in the number of invertebrate and vertebrate predators such as crustacean and fish which will prey on cod eggs, larvae, and younger fish.6 It is little wonder that a species, like cod, would eventually run into difficulties struggling to survive when its habitat is being continuously destroyed and the balance of their food chain has been disrupted.

Continued in following post.


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