This thread is interesting because one more time it illustrates the classic fisheries allocation conflict, who gets to kill the fish. It starts with emotion, gets tempered with facts and data, and then evolves into the how to change the allocation process. It has been going on for as long as humans have caught fish.

I would like to add one comment to the debate. This fishery and other freshwater terminal fisheries are preferable to any marine fishery for one important reason, bycatch. Below are a few lines from a 1994 FAO report titled "A Global Assessment of Fisheries Bycatch and Discards", available online. The (Shepard 1994) report was prepared for the then WDF, it is available in libraries but not easy to find. In an earlier thread, "Saturday on the Sound", Jerry Garcia asked about chum purse seining bycatch. It could be the subject of another thread because bycatch is a problem in all marine fisheries, commercial and sport.

"Other than data associated with trawling, NRC was unable to locate bycatch discard data for the Bering Sea salmon fisheries. In waters to the south of the Bering Sea, the incidental catch of juvenile chinook salmon in the Puget Sound purse seine fishery (Area 7/7A) between 1976 and 1985 varied from 111% to 489% of the adult chinook catch in this fishery, but the number of juveniles as a fraction of all target salmon species catch in numbers was much lower (0.57% to 4.39%). The situation in Puget Sound areas 8–13 regarding juvenile discards was much worse, ranging from 434% to 2867% of adult salmon catch (Shepard 1994). "