A number of conservation groups remain strongly opposed to killing the protected marine mammals. They point out that humans have contributed to salmon stocks’ decline and say pinnipeds shouldn’t suffer the consequences. The removal of seals and sea lions could have unintended and unexpected impacts across the ecosystem, including removing the primary food source for the mammal-eating transient killer whales.



In the 1980s, Jeffries was working with wildlife managers experimenting with underwater speakers to chase sea lions out of the mouth of the Columbia River. After learning of sea lion predation on the winter steelhead run, they moved to Ballard.

When the speakers were blasting noise at 205 decibels underwater, the sea lions swam with their heads above the surface. When wildlife managers tried to put netting across the canal below the locks, Hondo and his buddies hauled out of the water and waddled around the barrier. Wildlife managers have tried harassing sea lions with fire crackers, shooting them with rubber-tipped arrows and trapping and moving sea lions as far away as California. Nothing has worked.

“It’s a challenge trying to outsmart them,” Jeffries said.

At the time, the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act prevented the state from killing sea lions. Bounties offered by western states to protect fish stocks in the 20th Century drove pinniped populations dangerously low. In 1994, in response to the severe reduction of the Ballard winter steelhead run, Congress amended the law to allow the killing of problem pinnipeds. Since they’ve been protected, California sea lions have rebounded from fewer than 90,000 in the 1970s to nearly 300,000 today. Harbor seals have undergone a similar recovery, as have Steller sea lions, although those northern cousins of Herschel and Hondo are less often involved in confrontations with humans over fish.

In addition to the permit for lethal removals at the Bonneville Dam nearly 150 miles upstream from the Pacific Ocean, Oregon has asked for permission to kill sea lions below Willamette Falls. Officials say they’re ready to start trapping and killing during the November steelhead run if the federal government approves that request.

Proponents of removing sea lions say the animals are behaving unnaturally and are outside their historic ranges. There’s little historical record of sea lions traveling up the Columbia River and sparse archeological evidence as well.

But opponents say removing pinnipeds is a man-made solution to a man-made problem. Human pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction have all contributed to declining salmon stocks.

Killing sea lions is an attempt at a quick fix that avoids more difficult discussions around dam removal or reducing human catch limits, said Robb Krehbiel, the Northwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. There’s not enough evidence that killing pinnipeds has an impact on salmon populations, Krehbiel said.

“When we start talking about heavy-handed management of ecosystems, humans often get it wrong,” he said. “The more we try to pick up guns and engineer our way out of the problem, the worse it gets.”

The process of killing pinnipeds under existing federal law is resource intensive. It involves trapping, branding or tagging an animal, releasing it and using non-lethal detterrance. When that fails, state officials try to trap the sea lion again -- under federal law they could shoot it, but that method hasn’t been used -- and euthanize it.

Bipartisan legislation from a group of lawmakers from Washington, Idaho and Oregon would make it easier for wildlife managers to kill sea lions they encounter more than 112 miles upstream on the Columbia River or one of its tributaries. A version of the bill has already passed the House and a Senate bill by Jim Risch, R-Idaho, was passed out of committee in August.

Wildlife managers can reduce predation of salmon and limit their impact on the sea lion population by removing only the animals that have learned to feed below dams in the Columbia River, said Shaun Clements, senior policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.



“In the Columbia basin, their diet is 99 percent these salmon, steelhead and sturgeon, and essentially it’s not a natural behavior,” Clements said. “Fish didn’t evolve to have that level of predation. You’re just targeting a proportion of the (sea lion) population that’s preying exclusively on salmon, steelhead, sturgeon where they’re available. You’re still leaving 99-plus percent of the population out there.”

Removing harbor seals, which feed at the mouths of rivers and eat juvenile salmon in Puget Sound, presents a very different challenge. After the Aug. 28 meeting, members of the orcas task force said the issue needs more study. It’s not clear how much the seals’ feeding on juveniles impacts total stocks, and there might be non-lethal ways to reduce their predation. Increasing other food sources for seals, removing artificial haulouts near spawning rivers and staging the release of hatchery fish, which draw seals when they enter the sound in large numbers, could reduce predation.

Biologists are concerned that culling large numbers of pinnipeds could have a cascading effect across the ecosystem that goes beyond the transient orcas that eat seals and sea lions. Harbor seals feed on fish like Pacific hake that also eat young salmon.

“My fear is that ... others see this as a way to cull animals and remove them from the entire coast,” said Andrew Trites, the director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia. “That concerns me a lot. I think that would be a real tragedy.”

Trites isn’t convinced that seals and sea lions are outside of their historical range today. It’s possible their populations along the West Coast had been depleted by hunting well before white settlers arrived in the area.

“We tend to assume interaction between people and seals started with the arrival of Europeans, but it’s happened for thousands of years,” Trites said. “So there would have been hunting pressure put on the animals, and this is the first time in millenia that we have a chance to go back to an equilibrium.”

But he acknowledges feeding at the dams is having an unnatural impact on salmon populations, and it won’t be easy to return the Columbia and its tributaries to their natural states. Dams in the region are a major source of hydropower and are important for agriculture.

“The trade off may be if you’re going to have dams and locks, you have just have to destroy the animal,” Trites said. “You’ll have some no-go seal and sea lion areas, and it’s the price the population will have to pay to ensure the salmon survive. So in other words, it’s not a fair game. When you put predator and prey at the base of a dam, the dice are loaded in the predator’s favor.”

He cautioned that any killings of pinnipeds need to be carefully studied to gauge their impact. The shooting of about 50 seals in 1997 and 1998 at the mouth of the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island was hailed as a success when the salmon populations increased. But what’s often overlooked is that salmon populations increased at other rivers in the region where no killings occurred, raising questions about whether the Puntledge killings had any impact, Trites said.