Quote:
Originally Posted by Tosh
if your argument is that people take fish home and waste them, then why not spend that money on the education of anglers when they get there licenses. Then you would have in my mind a better fisherman(woman) and teach them to respect and love the waters as most of us do?. I just think that the money and time to do this would be better spent elsewhere.And you say lets balance everything out???...this province is full of rules protecting fish just look in the regs.
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Anarchists love to remove rules. Fact is without rules rampant abuse would destroy what you want. Fisheries management has to be a changing game. Think about it. The playing field is constantly changing and evolving. We have fish stocks that are running low...fish like pike, walleye, grayling, cutthroat trout and sturgeon to name a few have had their stocks reach scary lows. Others like mountain whitefish and maybe even perch will be next on the list. We have an increasing number of anglers that challenge the system by putting ever increasing pressure on the stocks. The increasing anglers and taxing the waters nearest to large cities causing enhanced depletion problems.
All these changes in the playing field necessitate thinking differently when managing the few dollars available with the people that want to catch fish. The old saying that a bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work probably came from someone trying to lighten the fact...it is just getting that much harder to find any fish to catch.
So...to me that says we must look to outside the box for ideas. The last one was the "quality" fishery proposal at Bullshead that that strongly fought and opposed by many individuals...only to have been implemented any ways. The changes scared many...but now probably 99% of those that were opposed are not proponents. I suspect there would be a 10 fold increase in protests if they tried to put Bullshead back to the way it was before.
You are a bit short sighted IMHO by commenting on my small point of fish wastage and then figure education would fix an over harvest problem in Alberta. People that want to kill fish for the freeze invariably max their limit every time. If the limits are too high or the fish are limited in numbers then the fish leave. Simple mathematics of supply and demand.
You talk about education being different than implementing a quality fishery regulation...that argument has no merit as there is no additional cost to tax payers. The stocking stays the same as before but the fish are not harvested the day they are stocked. They are allowed to grow bigger. While they are growing bigger they get caught over and over again by the young and old alike. Then once they reach the target size...harvest can occur but at a sustainable rate. The biggest problem in fisheries management is provide high enough catch rates...fish caught per unit hour...to justify from F&W's point of view the expense of stocking...and from the anglers point of view the effort to try and catch them.
If you want to qualify this whole debate it comes down to few simple points.
1. Do you want to catch fish when you go fishing before it is fished out? If you say yes...then a quality fishery is the only one that maximizes this.
2. Do you want to harvest fish during the whole fishing season? Then the quality fishery is the only one that provides this.
3. Do you want to catch sporting sized fish? Then the quality fishery is the only one that provides this.
Time does not need to prove this as Bullshead already has.
Cheers
Sun
STATS/FACTS for in 2009/2010
http://www.srd.alberta.ca/Newsroom/M...rt-2009-10.pdf
We had a F&W budget of $60.5 MM.
273,220 angler licences were sold
3.2 million trout were stocked in 259 different water bodies
52 million walleye stocked in Lac la Biche
100,705 MM in license revenue
I was interested in finding out what just the Fish portion of the budget is...but I could not find it.