I should'a known it was you that confused me! haha.
I do still find it distressing that some people harvest natives for
feeders, but the only people I (personally) know that do it are very
knowledgable people, so I take some comfort in that.
Ty
Ty Hall wrote:
>> ... someone posts that they saw a commercial
>> hatchery harvest wild native fish ...
Well, surprise, surprise, it seems I might have been the person who put
this buzz in your head. El whoops !!! I didn't make the connection.
Actually, the Richloam Hatchery to which I referred is a state facility ...
primarily raising game fish, that's where most of the political support and
funding comes from, but there were soon-to-be-released sturgeon in
residence when we visited ... and the flagfish I saw them get from traps
were coming out of one of their many multi-acre fish-raising ponds.
I'm not saying that's their only source of fish-for-forage, cause I don't
know that, but that's what I saw, and given their scale of operations, it's
hard to imagine they could harvest wild-fish in sufficient quantity to meet
their needs without totally depleting the local wild supplies. And they
sent us collecting in a (main-made) pond 1/4 mile or so from their main
facility, and fish were plentiful there, so manifestly they have not raped
& pillaged their own backyard.
But even if the thread started due to something of a mis-understanding, I
still found it interesting.
I guess when you "grow your own" live foodstuffs, you have direct
observable evidence about whether your level of production is sufficient
and sustainable. However, if you adopt a hunter/gatherer model rather than
an agricultural one, your environmental feedback on what is a sustainable
harvest is much more indirect (and subject to misinterpretation due to lack
of experience/knowledge.) And when other people rely on wild harvesting,
you hope their intentions and judgement are good ... but in the back of
your mind you know that, with all human activities, there's an absolute
minimum quota of two fools per hundred. And so it's kinda worrisome.
.02
Doug Dame
Interlachen FL
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