news/editorial

13 September 2015 News/Editorial

While we await the Government’s decision on the whole issue of salmon kill licences, it does no harm to remind ourselves of the science.

The Tweed senior biologist, Dr Ronald Campbell, gave a presentation, on kill licencing, to the River Tweed Commission meeting last Monday, and you can access this on youtube by clicking on the link given in the e-mail extract (below) from Fay Hieatt (RTC administrator) on the whole subject of the RTC/Tweed Foundation’s youtube channel, news, the biologist’s blog etc.

Please do take the time to do this.

Ronald’s presentation takes you logically and methodically through what we know about Tweed salmon numbers, the rod catch rate, egg deposition from the surviving females…….and comes to the conclusion that kill licencing, quotas and tagging has no value whatever and is not supported by the science.

In a week when the Scottish Government apparently admitted that it was not the science which made it decide against GM crops, are we about to see another decision taken in contravention of the science?

If so, it will be an absurd start to the brave new world of salmon management (supposedly) being based on the evidence.

It will also be in contravention of the very detailed objections to kill licencing lodged by the Tay and the Spey, as well as the Tweed.

It is a curiosity, to put it at its mildest, that the ASFB, the AST and the S&TA have all come out in favour of kill licencing for rods, for reasons best known to themselves, but clearly having nothing whatever to do with the science.

Here is the extract of Fay’s e-mail and the link to Ronald’s presentation.

“We have now published the presentation Ronald Campbell made at the meeting, examining the case for implementation of the Government's proposed Licence to Kill scheme on Tweed.

The presentation is available on the Tweed Foundation's YouTube channel and can be accessed by:

Following this link:

https://www.youtube.com/user/tweedfoundation?feature=em-share_video_user

The Tweed Foundation's YouTube channel has a large number of short films on all aspects of the Foundation's work and can be found by typing "Tweed Foundation" into the YouTube Search.

All issues of importance, together with a Biologist's Blog, are available on our Tweed News website (http://www.rivertweed.org.uk). You can sign up to subscribe to the site – free - which means that you will automatically be sent an alert each time a new article appears.”