PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION  REELS IN WIN OVER FISHY ENVIRONMENTAL EDICTS

News Release - Oregon - 9/14/01 -Federal bureaucrats were wrong to list certain "wild" coho Oregon salmon as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, when the bureaucrats didn't give the same protected status to other salmon that are similar in every way except that they were spawned in hatcheries.  So ruled a federal judge this week, in the PLF case of Alsea Valley Alliance v. Daley.  As the court put it, the regulators had created "the unusual circumstance of two genetically identical coho salmon swimming side-by-side in the same stream, but only one receives ESA protection while the other does not."

PLF's purpose in the litigation:  To focus on the arbitrary and illogical ways that the Endangered Species Act is often implemented.  One result of PLF's win - one hopes - might be more momentum for reforming the ESA, a poorly crafted law that gives bureaucrats too much discretion to interfere with property rights and trample on people's livelihoods.

The deceptive games that regulators play were highlighted in the case.  As PLF attorney Russ Brooks noted:  "If the thousands of hatchery-spawned coho had been counted originally, their significant numbers would have called into question the need for listing ["wild"] Oregon coho as a 'threatened species' in the first place."

PLF argued that regulators had relied on "politicized" or "junk science" to list the "wild" coho salmon.  Oregon officials, under the direction of federal bureaucrats, had systematically slaughtered thousands of hatchery-spawned salmon and millions of their eggs in the Alsea River basin between 1997 and 1999, claiming they were a threat to the genetic purity of so-called "wild" salmon - even though the fish were genetically alike.

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