Into a slough of despair. The deeper I get into reading the scientific papers on how to create sterilized, sex changed, fish farm fish slurry out of what would have been beautiful, healthy wild salmon is turning my stomach. And I have a cast iron stomach (I’ve raised eight kids.) I’m also relatively shock proof. But, in reading another of Dr. Edward Donaldson’s papers, I find I am not shock proof at all. The salmon Dr. Donaldson (DFO, West Vancouver laboratories) and colleagues are designing to stock fish farms with, are not only also being stocked in BC lakes, but already have been released into BC’s coastal waters.
We are told in a paper entitled The Reproductive Containment of Genetically Altered Salmonids that salmon, triploided and directly treated with estradoil (the most potent of estrogens ) “have been released from both Capilano Salmon Hatchery and Big Qualicum Salmon Hatchery into British Columbia Coastal Waters.” Page 114
And in the same paper we read that these fish were caught and are being caught, by both commercial and recreational fisher people and consumed by humans. However, there are many problems associated with sterilization of salmon, as Dr. Donaldson goes on to inform us, because male hormones are also being used to sterilize fish. Why? Just for fun? To see what will happen? Just to see what will happen to wild fish when some of the treated fish are not completely sterilized as has happened before? There isn’t even a reason to use male androgens as fish farms want all females. Dr. Donaldson tell us on page 118, bottom of the page no.3
No. 3 “Androgens are potent steroids (testosterone, etc.) which are biologically active in humans. Operators must therefore utilize appropriate protective equipment and avoid self exposure.”
No. 5 “Androgen solutions must be disposed of after use in an environmentally sound manner.”
No.6 “While androgen residues are completely eliminated in a matter of two to three weeks after the termination of treatment and the sterilized fish at the time of marketing contain no indictable levels of natural androgen, the potential exists for consumer resistance to fish that have received androgen treatment during early development.”
The potential exists? Just the potential? That the public would be appalled at buying and eating sterilized, sex changed, super fat fish? With no real assurance that hormonal residues are not lurking in the mushy fish flesh? I think perhaps Dr. Edward Donaldson and his colleges have been driven more than a little mad by the secrecy they must labour under; by a grossly magnified sense of their own privilege to destroy and rearrange natural systems almost at whim, and by both provincial and federal governments who recognize only one mantra, that of profit.
This is the same sense of an almost god-like privilege that the logging corporations feel when they freely admit they are after every last old growth tree in this province so that natural forests can be replaced by tree farms. Is it such a stretch for the BC government and the government of Canada to feel that it might also be a profitable thing to change the very fish of the seas into manufactured versions of fish that can be patented? Not likely? Oh, very likely. I’ll tell you about Monsanto’s interest in these fish later. Also about the interest that an extremely prominent businessman in British Columbia has in FrankenFish.
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