Man allegedly pours bleach into Oregon hatchery tank and kills 18,000 salmon
Man allegedly pours bleach into Oregon hatchery tank and kills 18,000 salmon
Joshua Alexander Heckathorn, 20, arrested and booked into jail for second-degree burglary, criminal trespass and criminal mischief
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...
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?
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.
Djjd
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.
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.
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.
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.