willie
Sadly, I agree with almost everything you said, and I agree with the proposition that it would be 'better' for fish farms to be 'contained'.
I was merely responding to some of your comments regarding the pellets vs 'wild' food idea. Chemicals are chemicals, whether they are sourced from crunching wild invertebrates or from manufactured pellets.
The flesh may not be as pink in a farmed salmon without adding the same chemicals that cause the wild fish to go pink, but it is otherwise chemically identical.
And the thread was about the 'appearance' of the farm on the otherwise pristine loch.....not a debate about whether or not fish should or should not be farmed.
As I said previously, the best thing for the locals to do is find some seagrass or local wildlife or whatever that exists nowhere else, and have the pens moved out of the way.
And Bruce, while I also agree to some extent with the anti-fishing-bans arguments, they are there for a reason - to protect the juveniles so the stocks of fish don't crash.
OK, so it's not
recreational anglers fault that the stocks are crashing - no argument from me there - but until there is some way to get all recreational fishermen to adopt catch-and-release there is bugger all chance of getting some bans lifted.
That said, check the legals...a lot of fuss has been made about bans that pertain to certain areas, but they only target certain species, or do not cover catch-and-release angling by recreational fishers.....so worth double-checking....
But, yeah, it's a bummer that the depredations of the Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean (etc etc) fishing fleets have caused these bans on our local inshore fisheries.
And as I said previously, if the south-east-asian nations' populations increase as they have done in recent years - they being the largest consumers of the larger pelagic fish - so the pressure on those stocks will continue to grow, and numbers in the wild populations will continue to fall.....it is foreseeable that a total fishing ban may yet come into being for ALL our coastal waters, perhaps even as far out as the 100m limit......although I suspect that's a century or so away, so nothing for us to worry about....
And for the UK readers, remember the Icelandic 'Fishing Wars' from 20 or so years ago???
We may yet see armed patrol boats covering the fishing zones much more closely than they do today....and they do....today...so don't think it isn't happening just because it's not on the 6-oclock news.