POINT OF NO RETURN

Why Holyrood must look beyond rivers to protect salmon stocks

There is an old Chinese proverb that says that to someone who only has a hammer every problem looks like a nail. It’s an apt description of the way the Scottish government is tackling issues in the fisheries world.

With the numbers of Atlantic salmon returning to our rivers in freefall, lawmakers have introduced a raft of emergency catch-andrelease measures that they believe will protect our dwindling stocks. The majority of fisheries managers and anglers would beg to differ: they point to the fact that the salmon’s problems lie in the high seas (well beyond the scope of even the most ambitious Scottish administration), not with the actions of anglers on our rivers.

Nevertheless, Holyrood has introduced an immediate catch-and-release policy on all salmon caught before 1 April, and is considering a petition by the Salmon and Trout Association to extend this to 1 July. Furthermore, it is currently consulting on a scheme for next year where an angler could only kill a salmon beyond these dates if they’d purchased a numbered tag from the government.

But will this really protect the salmon from further decline? These proposals might seem commendable at first sight, but dig a little deeper and you start to see the flaws.

It is a scientific fact that 95 per cent of salmon die at sea, so to concentrate efforts on protecting the remaining 5 per cent (of which only a fraction are ever caught by anglers) would appear to be ignoring the elephant in the room.

On the River Tweed, for instance, it has been demonstrated that only 1 in 60 of the salmon that enter the river are killed by anglers. This is due to the voluntary measures already adopted by Tweed anglers to release all fish before the 1st July and the vast majority thereafter.

As a counter argument, some fisheries biologists say that those few returning salmon carry the most precious genes necessary for survival, having battled through all that the ocean’s predators and climate change can throw at them, and they must be protected at all costs. I don’t think any serious angler would disagree with that, but let’s not forget that already fishermen are voluntarily returning up to 80% of all the fish they catch. And yet the salmon netting stations that infest the Scottish coastline are killing everything they trap. Behold the second elephant in the room.

Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, a private charity led by Icelandic conservationist Orri Vigfusson, has been attempting to grasp the real problem. It has recently signed up to a renewed moratorium with the Faroese on netting in the salmon’s high-seas feeding grounds. After the deal was announced last month, Vigfusson commented: ‘I would especially appeal to the authorities in Scotland and Norway to rethink their support for commercial salmon fishing. Both countries are currently set to allow nets to destroy almost all the extra spawners that could run their rivers as a result of this Faroese agreement.’

Similarly, private angling interests on the Tweed have spent over £2 million buying out the 40 local nets that were plundering their stocks. Rather galling then to be told by Holyrood, without any evidence to back it up, that anglers are now part of the problem.

Real salmon conservation is paid for by selling fishing permits, and if experience so far this season is anything to go by, the latest catch-and-release legislation will have the very opposite effect to that intended. It has been reported, for instance, that permit sales on Loch Tay, a prime spring fishery which has been severely affected by the new 1 April no-kill policy, are down 60% so far this year.

Be under no illusion – once these catch-andrelease policies have been introduced through legislation they will never be reversed. And what’s more, if netting stations have to buy numbered tags under a quota system from next season, as is being proposed, you can guarantee that they’ll apply for the maximum number achievable. The end result? More fish killed.

The Scottish government, once again overwielding its ‘rural remit’ hammer, has targeted the wrong people with the wrong policies in a misguided bid to stem the drastic decline of our salmon stocks. I fear that, at best, its interventions won’t make the slightest bit of difference, but at worst will speed the decline in the number of salmon returning to our rivers.