The maximum penalty for poaching one Chinook salmon – a species that is protected under the endangered species act – is $750 per fish. If officials assessed fines for every salmon killed, Heckathorn could be asked to pay nearly $14m
Fucking do it. Throw the entire library at this fucker.
To be fair, these are tiny juvenile fish, not adult fish which the authors of the law presumably had in mind. The article indicates that only two- to four-hundred of the juveniles were expected to survive long enough to return as adults, which would correspond to a fine of $150,000 to $300,000. Still more than this guy would probably ever actually pay…
So the law doesn’t specify size? Sounds like dude owes 14mil
“a fertilized egg is a person”… Hm, so a salmon lays thousands of eggs and the male just mass fertilizes last I knew. I doubt the season matters much when they are kept in controlled environments. Wouldn’t they breed year round as their birth place is there home? If so. Jump that number up by a lot. If someone murders a pregnant mother the judge doesn’t say, well there is a x% chance it doesn’t make it to adulthood.
Jurisprudence shouldn’t be based on some random persons presumption.
The law says fish and doesn’t specify age. Therefore I presume that’s exactly what they meant.
Throw the book at him.
If I go out and kill a newborn fawn in the woods for shits and giggles without the appropriate tags, out of season, etc. it’s still poaching, just the same as if I went out and killed an 8 point trophy buck I didn’t have a tag for, took it home, ate it, mounted it’s head on my wall, etc. That fawn may not have survived, it may not have grown into anything impressive, but at the end of the day I killed a deer I was not legally allowed to kill. The guy writing the law probably didn’t have killing fawns for fun in mind, they probably pictured something more like the second example I gave, but I think most of us would agree that the fawn-killer should be punished just as or maybe even more harshly that the buck-killer.
I can’t think of any good reason it shouldn’t be the same for fish.
EDIT: also, usually with fishing regulations, there’s also size limits, you can’t keep a fish under a certain size, it has to be thrown back. These fish were almost certainly under the legal size. Not to mention creel limits, even if they were somehow all of a legal size, and even if he somehow did everything else legally (which he didn’t,) I suspect the creel limit on salmon is significantly lower than 18,000
reads comment
Looks at user name
You made that up.
What are the costs to grow another cohort of fish? What is the time value of setting the program back for the number of years that it will take to get back to normal, and that is assuming that we can?
Need to bring back forced labor for people that intentionally harm society.
Let them slave away the rest of their days, if they want to eat they will work 12 hours a day. If not they don’t eat and our problem takes care of itself.
That’s literally what For Profit prisons are designed for. And it’s constitutionally legal:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
For the record, that’s fucked up.
If only animal law was actually enforced like tree law…
He told law enforcement officials he had visited a storage area the day before and picked up a bottle of bleach
That sounds way too premeditated to be explained by simple mental illness.
After the past year, I can believe it.
I hope you never have to deal with a family member with paranoid schizophrenia.
way too premeditated to be explained by simple mental illness
Ah, you think it was complex mental illness?
In all seriousness though, moving a bottle of bleach the day before is still within the capability of someone experiencing an acute mental illness.
Of course, it’s pure speculation either way at this point.
I’d argue that premeditating something like this is a rather strong indicator of some form of mental illness.
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Why would you assume he is mentally ill? I didn’t see that mentioned in the article.
Firstly, I don’t read any assumption of mental illness in that comment - if anything the comment is rejecting mental illness. But given that there’s no mention of any motive - and the difficulty in even thinking of one - mental illness is very reasonable to consider as a possibility.
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Lol what is wrong with you
yes communists are always doing things like this
Wow, what a post history
Usually when I see someone say that on here, I roll my eyes, but god damn dude…
This program was doing a good thing for the environment. It has long-lasting benefits for everyone. This is heartbreaking.
Yep same as that asshole that started that wild fire by multnomah falls. Garnish their wages for the rest of their lives. I don’t want them to ever stop paying.
or the guy that pissed in the holding reservoir in Portland. The utility dumped all (I forget the exact number) 7 million gallons or so but his fine was in the thousands of dollars and not what the retail cost of that amount of water would be.
Wait what? Like an outdoor reservoir/lake like thing or something else?
correct. The one I am thinking about but can’t find pre-coffee happened in the past couple of years but I found this one from ~10 years ago (38 Million gallons): https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/17/304128931/one-mans-pee-pushes-portland-to-flush-38m-gallons-of-water
That just seems like a bad call to me in ways … Maybe this is more normal than I think, but … what if fish get in there, ducks, other animals, some runoff, etc?
Part of that is mitigated by the size I imagine but that should also apply to human urine… I would think anyways?
Is there a motive?? I didn’t see any mention in the article other than someone else asking the same question I have, why the hell did he do it?
I’m gonna guess meth + boredom considering he lives on the coast.
Probably some vegan psychopath from PETA. They like to meaninglessly slaughter animals to prove their point.
Literally why would a vegan kill 18,000 salmon lol. Vegans try to not kill animals the best they can. Most commenters here kill 250+ animals annually because “taste good” and you jump to the vegans?
No no no look not regular vegans. PETA vegans.
You know, the ones that think cats and dogs would be better off dead than as pets. If you’re feeling too upbeat go ahead and Bing it.
Seriously! I wish we lived the way they do in other countries where there are dozens of stray/wild dogs and cats living on the streets
This is what happens when you’re so open minded your brain falls out
My sarcasm detector is failing…
They are pointing out that it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. If you had a public that treated animals with respect they wouldn’t be needed.
When have they ever said that? Any time I see an actual quote from the organization it’s something like
Quotes from Ingrid Newkirk. The PETA “shelters” have frequently been found to euthanasia oriented with little effort put into re-homing.
“Pet ownership is slavery. Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or be entertained by.”
What PETA has said, and what they have done, are often not the same.
People who support the ethical treatment of animals and veganism often don’t know and even more often don’t want to know about the skeletons in the closet, and would usually be unsupportive of such acts.
Extremism happens.
Citation sorely needed. I can find an awful lot of wacky stuff that Newkirk has said on record (most of which is easily taken out of content to make it seem like she said it unprompted, as opposed to being part of a larger story or a response to a particular question), but the only sources I can find for that quote are quote aggregator websites that don’t cite their sources.
Literally when have they ever done that
PETA is well known for just killing because that’s what everyone says about them. Nobody ever seems to talk about the numerous animal rights campaigns. You’d think if they were obsessed with mindlessly slaughtering dogs, they wouldn’t be out there putting up doghouses for them. They’ve also spayed and neutered hundreds of thousands of animals. Of course, those don’t get included in the shelter statistics, since their shelter is specifically made for humane euthanasia for strays and pets whose owners can’t afford vet care.
And Maya. Two employees who were at that neighborhood picking up stray dogs, were given permission to take an unattended female brown Chihuahua without tags. Instead, they picked up an unattended female brown Chihuahua without tags (different). They didn’t follow PETA’S own guidelines about holding animals for several days before euthanizing, and were fired for it. This is not PETA stealing pets out of people’s homes to slaughter them mindlessly. If that’s what they were doing, then why didn’t they take that family’s other unattended, unidentified dogs?
Please do yourself a favor and read from sources that don’t cite CORE, the CCF, or Nathan Winograd. You’ll find that the stories are a lot more nuanced when they aren’t being told by the meat and dairy industry.
There is actually a lot of controversy over hatchery salmon. They can cause more problems than they fix. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t some vegan psychopath, though.
It just takes one asshole to ruin it for everyone else.
Bleach will affect the Salmon Population.