For the little guys!!!
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) had no legal basis to rely on pessimistic statistical models to justify imposing costly federal regulations onto fisheries and lobstermen.
The court held in its decision that the NMFS “was egregiously wrong” in its interpretation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) which would have enabled the agency to impose costly regulations on lobstermen in order to protect endangered whales.
Full article, HERE, from Daily Caller.
This is a serious loss for the econazis, as they’ve been trying for years to put the lobstermen out of business, and this would have done it. Now, that’s gone. What has been ‘alleged’ is that Right Whales were getting ‘trapped’ in lobster trap lines, but there hasn’t been an actual proven occurrence of a whale dying due to being ‘trapped’ in lobster gear.
The one incident being bandied about by the left is Argo, a Right Whale that made it to Florida with a couple of lobster traps from off Nova Scotia around its tail. He was freed, and swam off.
The Maine Lobster Association has been working for years to make their gear safer, allowing whales to safely pass through their fisheries. HERE is a link to WHOI’s design of a new retrieval system currently being used.
Of note- Strict federal and state laws prohibit lobster fishing in Atlantic waters when a right whale is sighted in the vicinity, normally knocking three months off the fishing season every year.
And the irony is that the feds they want to squish small business because of the whales, but offshore wind farms, which are killing whales by the dozens, are okay.
Because the econazi’s say so. Look at all the endangered birds being killed. Hell, you can go to JAIL for picking a feather up off the ground now. But kill dozens of eagles, raptors, etc? If you’re doing it with a windmill it’s A O K!
These same lobstermen are the ones who saved the fishery in the 1930s without Fed help, with simple rules and measures for their catch. The population rebounded quickly, once you could take only a minimum body/claw size and no breeding females.
The gear is pretty safe to begin with. That whale must have tangled lines from two traps, while chasing a bait ball. Unusual but not impossible. Since it swam safely to subtropical waters, doesn’t sound like it was in great danger – except from bureaucrats that want to fil its fishing grounds with low frequency noise that will affect its feeding.
What Midwest Chick said. Windfarms and other ‘green’ initiatives are far more deadly to wildlife and fisheries than traditional harvesting and fishing.
What also is killing the whales are factory ships run by both the ChiComs and the Russians. Neither of which we are allowed to talk about. But there has been an upsurge of illegal harvesting by foreign powers in US waters over the last few years.
Russia has pretty much wiped out the Alaskan King Crab fishery, and the ChiComs are hitting salmon and cod fisheries very hard.
Both countries leave swaths of dead ocean wherever their fleets go. They harvest everything. Fish, crab, turtles, whales and dolphin, it all dies.
MC/John- Interesting isn’t it???
PK- Concur.
Beans- Yep! And the Chinese are fishing as far east as South America and the Galapagos.
The NMFS will do what ALL criminal Fed Gov agencies do when handed a smack down by a judge. Repackage their rules and reissue them knowing that it will take YEARS and MILLIONS of dollars in legal fees for their intended victims to get relief from their abusive misconduct. These agencies and the criminals running them NEVER suffer any meaningful consequences for violating us or our rights so they just keep tinkering with their evil rules and reissuing them ad nauseum ad infinitum.
Maybe a contrarian view?-
My family went to Bar Harbor Maine a couple years ago to take a tour and look at Lighthouses. The number of lobster traps in that water was…. boggling.
Seemed to me there ain’t much self-regulation goin’ on right now.
Sooooo…….
You think there are a lot of traps fishing for non-existent lobsters?
I was fishing for the local crays under similar regulations. By some standards, we had a lot of nets along our stretch of the river, too. But we only KEPT about one out of every ten caught, because that was the ratio of “keepers” to “non-keepers”.
Berried females, and any over or under the specified size limits…… back they went.
We didn’t catch our limits.
I’m not familiar with the regs and limits that apply to the fisher under discussion. Just pointing out that numbers of pots has little to do with it….. and yeah, this fishery has improved a lot, too.