Gary-
Not at all - I would agree that Lichatowich is pretty much right on target that hatcheries are a failure for restoration of the multitrude of the factors that caused the decline of our salmon.

Does that mean that hatchery are always bad? - I don't think so. Rather relying on hatcheries to make up of our distruction of the fish's habitats was a major mistake. We as a society attempted to take the easy way out by attempting to have our cake (use the fish's habitats for our own uses) and eat it as well (replace the lost production with hatcheries).

Over the last 150 years we have destroyed much of the productivity and capacity of our rivers to support anadromous fish. In Puget Sound habitat modeling indicates that the wild chinook potential our our rivers are only as little as 10% to maybe 50% of what they once were (most less than a 1/3 of historic potential). As a society we have not valued the resource enough to change our behaviors to restore or even preserve what little good habitat remains. The events of the last 24 hours clearly demostrates that we as a nation still don't value that resource enough to forgo the short term monentary gain of extracting reources from our watersheds.

In short the hatchery issue is very complex, what may be true of a salmon hatchery program may not be the case for a low land lake trout program or the seeding of a beach with clams. I merely was encouraging D3S to look at the full range of hatchery programs and their pros and cons so that he could form his own opinion based on his personal values.

As an aside I firmly belief that we need to figure out how to make hatcheries an workable part of the fishing sence if we going to continue to fish. At the rate at which we are destroying our river habitats even CnR will not be an option for many stocks of wild fish.

Tight lines
S malma