Curt,

That's my point...the ESA does not have an automatic prohibition on take if the critters are listed as "threatened", 4(d) rules or not. If it did, there would not have been one river fishery in any river, for salmon, steelhead, trout, whitefish, or suckers, since the day the listing came down, since there are wild steelhead in the streams year 'round, and there are no 4(d) rules in place.

As I said above, I would love to think that the Department, and the Director and a few higher up cronies who you and I both know, would actually be looking at the health of the resource and making a conservation minded decision based on that...

We both know, however, who those people are, and how they operate, and that is not how they do things...as a matter of fact, they usually go out of their way to justify killing as many of whatever species we're talking about as they can possibly justify, and an extra dose of dead ones on top of that can't be justified.

That makes this decision, and specifically the timing of it and the particular fishery involved, very suspect in my mind.

Fish on...

Todd