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Show The Utah Independent May 26, 1977 8 Page The Paper That Dares To Take A Stand WHY YOU COULD PAY 82.00 FOR A CAN OF TUNA Continued from page 1 dollars in the largest tuna clippers with a full load). These incredibly draconian penalties might be compared to the fate awaiting those who are guilty of manslaughter, the accidental killing of a human being. But the fact is that its now much less costly to kill people! What is this madness, you may well ask? What is so special about the eastern spinner porpoise? In response to enormous pressure from professional the National environmentalists, Marine Fisheries Service (N.M.F.S.) recently decided that the species is a depleted below an arbitrary figure conclusion more or less plucked from the blue, since nobody knows how many eastern spinner porpoises the oceans hold. This is statistical gymnastics to serve a political purpose in this case that of taking the heat off the N.M.F.S., which has displeased the environmental lobby by failing to destroy the American tuna industry. Americas tuna fleet recently returned to San Diego and San Pedro a month early and 20,000 tons short of A tuna, with all flags at flat-oresultant shortage of tuna will clearly boost the price. Bureaucrats and environmentalist lobbyists dont care to venture how high, but you might well be paying double within the year. If so, you can thank the lawyers, propagandists, and fundraisers who have discovered that porpoise as clients have many advantages over people. They let you keep all the loot collected, and they cant even fire you. The origin of all this legal grief is the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. The majority of Congressmen, in voting for it, were thinking to protect whales and seals and such. The troublesome portion of the Act was inserted in the Senate version by former Senator Fred Harris and retained when House and Senate versions were reconciled in Conference half-mas- t. ut Committee. The radical Harris, responding to the siren song of an obviously powerful lobby, had originally sponsored a bili which the Committee for Humane Legislation characterized as much stronger, a bill which would not even have allowed the American tuna industry time to work on a solution to their problem. In Congressional Hearings conducted on February 17th, it took Chairman Robert Leggett nearly half an hour to read a summary of the battle since passage of the 1972 Act. In the end, various federal judges based in Washington, far from reality but close to the environmentalist lobbies cluttering the capital, decided that the tuna industry should be sacrificed in the name of being nice to porpoises. Said judges were briefly defied by U.S. District Judge William Enright of San Diego, who gave the industry a breather, saying I cannot abdicate my responsibility while the entire industry withers. However, the outraged Washington judges responded by ordering the Secretary of Commerce to employ the F.B.I., along with U.S. Marshals, to keep the fishermen away from their work. In driven to the limit by legal pressure which is depriving them of a livelihood, the fishermen of the American Tunaboat Association sent a delegation to Washington to plead for relief before the Leggett Subcommittee. The tuna fishermen tuna-porpoi- se two-mon- mid-Februar- y, th poises to escape while the were joined by union representatives who detailed how many cannery workers would lose their jobs if this continued, and by a Puerto Rican official tuna remained in the net. angered by the same consideration. What the Congressmen refer to as monitor groups were given equal time to carp, criticize, and carry on like schoolmarms about punishing the bad captains. The tuna men showed a film detailing their own research into better methods of sparing the porpoises. At present, only about one percent of those wrapped by the net are killed. Underwater film showed porpoise sulking in the nets, but responding well to the chance to escape during backdown. A delightful lady marine biologist, Patricia Forkan, suggested that,, since porpoise are intelligent enough to learn what it means, a sound source, a sort of freedom bell, might be placed in the water to guide these animals to the proper part of the net for escape. Finer mesh nets could be used, to further scale-dowaccidental entanglement. All of this work was being done by the industry, without a penny of the small fortune collected. by environmentalist hustlers rattling the can for Flipper nationwide. Having seen those groups in action, the best one can say is that some of them are But they are, without exception, arrogant and uncompromising, and they have never put any food on my table and never will. They proved totally uninterested in the economic damage they were doing to consumers, and simply regarded the fishermen as beneath contempt. That may not be the way the rest of us see it. One of the easiest ways to detect g fish, is to look tuna, a for porpoise, because yellowfin tuna like to swim beneath two types of porpoise, spotters and spinners. Tuna used to be caqght by only. Then, in 1958, American tuna skippers figured out how to catch them with purse seines. If you think that you would enjoy tearing around in the open sea in a speedboat, then tuna fishing is for you, because the porpoises, and the tuna below them, are rounded up by seaborne cowboys and then wrapped by a gigantic net which extends hundreds of feet down. At the lower end of the net, a cable drawn through pursing rings then tightens the bottom of the net into a purse. After that the net is drawn in, and within it are tons of tuna. The big problem all along has been what to do about the porpoises which are also in the net. Some foreign fishermen have a market for them, also, but there is none in the United States. Aside from that, there are several other excellent reasons why fishermen would rather spare the porpoises. They are large animals and tear up the nets. In addition they are like hunting dogs in that they may be useful in finding other tuna. Besides, the tuna fishermen know and like the porpoises often risking their own lives to save them. fleet grew, so As the did the number of porpoises killed in the course of tuna fishing. On their own the tuna fishermen tried to do something about it. Back in 1970, a n well-intentione- d. deep-runnin- hook-and-li- ne purse-seinin- g notable tuna skipper invented the Medina panel which formed a sort of ramp at the far end of the seine, thus helping the surface-runninpor g deeper-runnin- g Other skippers perfected a tricky backdown procedure which temporarily submerged the end of the net, while speedboat cowboys herded the porpoises in that direction. Many, many fishermen have gone into the sea themselves to help porpoises to escape. Many have been injured in doing so. So it is the tuna industry, with the aid of some elements of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is actually doing its best to save the porpoises. Anything short of not catching tuna, that is. Not catching tuna when they are near porpoise is the only solution which is often the environmentalists can think of. Tuna fishing is an important business. The boats and gear are terribly expensive; even the fuel is enormously costly. These are not pleasure cruises. The tuna fishermen cannot afford to go out and clown around. And if you think, as I did, whos going to know what theyre doing out there? then it will amuse you to leam that the U.S. Coast Guard sends spy planes to monitor Ashing methods, and that foreign fishermen setting on tuna can get a big reward for turning in Americans who do likewise. Our tuna fishermen, who have a staggering investment in boats and a quarter of a million equipment dollars for the net alone is not unusual must produce profitably in order to stay afloat in more ways than one. The porpoise lobby airily tells me that they were warned about buying all those boats, and they cant use their purse seines, thats all. The lobbyists have spoken; their arrogance is hard to believe. When fishermen get up in the morning, their way of making a dollar is to provide us with something to eat. When these lobbyists get up in the morning, their way of making a buck is to prevent the fishermen from fishing profitably. Yet we are supposed to regard their espousal of the porpoise as selfless dedication. Watching these well-pai- d operators in one sees them action, smug and sleek, wallowing in the secular sainthood of their own propaganda machine. The tuna fishermen and their families are Americans. Their ancestors invented the tuna industry around the turn of the century, everyhave. want to dont They thing they leave the United States, but they are seriously considering taking their boats away and basing themselves in some other country where environmentalists are not allowed to harass the producers of badly needed food. Other countries are, indeed, wooing them; they represent a gold mine, after all. They can bring jobs, tax revenues, and needed exports to countries like Mexico, Panama, Netherlands Antilles, and so forth. Not in any other country would they have these unproductive fanatics harassing them year after year with the power of national government. The totalitarian instincts of the environmentalists shone forth at the February Hearings, when they gloated over a 1916 statute which would prohibit the tuna fishermen from registering their boats elsewhere. It seems that, in order to remove from United States jurisdiction any vessel which could be useful to the U.S. Navy, it was necessary to obtain permission from the National Maritime Admin and-buil- t - istration. The tuna clippers easily fall within this classification; during World War II, the entire fleet was painted grey within weeks. So, in the name of national defense, a subject the environmentalists normally give rather little thought, the law can act to pin down their victims for further torment. The environmentalists even claimed that Americans aboard for- eign-fla- g ships would be hunted down and prosecuted. One might wish they would become so incensed about our friendly neighborhood muggers. The U.S. Coast Guard, incidentally, should now be employed to prevent Soviet factory ships from sweeping our fishing grounds clean. But, if the porpoise lobby has its way, Coast will be spanning the Guard Pacific in search of American tuna fishermen. Meanwhile, the propagandists are responsible for using children to turn out such letters as the following: e I am writing about fishing on sic. If you are going to fish for yellowfined sic tuna you should drop your nets and take them up right away so you can sort them out and get all the dolfins sic and porpose sic out. How would you like to get held under water and not beable sic to get air and then die very very slowly. You might get away but you would leave a fin or a half a tail behind. I think it hurts very much. I am DISGUSTED with the way you catch your tuna fish. Tishing sic on porpoise is one of the most unfair things in the world. You wouldnt like getting scooped up in a net and than sic drown. We will never forgive you if all the dolphins leave this world. I dont think you would like to be drownd sic and then thrown back in the water when you are already dead. A bale of this material, accomof fisherpanied by men drowning in nets, descended from the public schools upon the American spy-plan- es por-pos- kiddie-cartoo- ns Tunaboat Association last winter. Fishermen could laugh it off if it were not the sort of nonsense which pushes through legislation. Pressure on Congress can take the form of volume of mail times emotional agitation; the intelligence' displayed is irrelevant. A spokesman for the Committee for Humane Legislation boasted of having generated stunning quantities of mail resulting in a law which can make the price of tuna climb the wall and punch through the ceiling. It does the fishermen no good to point out that bottlenose dolphins like the popular Flipper are not associated with tuna and therefore never tum up in the nets, because the fishermen can hardly compete with all the professional propaganda outfits that know how to play and their teachers like an organ. Just for fun I called the Fabius School, from which the above letters came, and spoke first to the principal, Michael Zindorf. Yes, he knew the difference between propaganda and education, but with regard to having Fabius pupils enlisted in the propaganda wars, he said, I hate tuna, so I dont mind. well-oile- d, fifth-grade- rs Neither he nor the fifth-grad- e teacher, Miss Tina Place, quite rel- ished publicity however. I asked Miss Place why the spelling was so bad, and she said she corrected their first Continued on page 10 |