AJ's Dad wrote:Lucious,
I went and took a look at the Nw Sportsman link you posted. I read the comments at the bottom and couldn't help leaving one myself.
Very interesting to calc the cost per fish to kill off the pike in the POR.
Here's the comment I left in response to one by a lady named Mary. She posted this:
Wait who paid for that?
How much did it cost per fish?
Why didn’t they just put a bounty on the fish and then the fisherman would come to the area,
camp,
eat,
shop and spend that bounty money?
Seems like one big SNAFU!
( I think Mary is a smart lady)
I posted this:
Mary, the money used to pay for this enorthern pike genocide was given to the Kalispel Tribe by the BPA. The dollar figure was, I believe $10,000,000 over a ten year period. To answer your per fish question. $10mil divided by 10 years is $1,000,000 per year. $1,000,000 divided by 5808 fish slaughtered in 2012 brings us to a total of $172.1763 per dead pike during that year. I also believe that money was not being distributed evenly over that ten year period. I believe there was a larger chunk paid out during the first two years. That would make the per fish total much higher.
As for your comment on a bounty, I say if they offered a bounty of less than a 20% of that, lets say $30 per fish, their cost per fish would be dramatically reduced, even after staffing pay stations to collect the fish. With a bounty like that, anglers would more than likely over run the area and spend lots and lots and lots and lots of money in the local community. One would think that filling campgrounds and motels, watching products fly off the shelves at local grocery and sporting goods stores, seeing many many gallons of gas sold at local gas stations, and on and on, would be a great thing for the local economy. I would venture to say that some of those anglers would end up spending some of their time and bounty money at and in lets say, maybe a casino? Maybe the experts on this subject have already considered that and figured the local economy was in good enough shape that it doesn’t need that kind of support.
The bottom line here is MONEY and who gets it. If the BPA worked with the state of Washington and paid out a bounty, those millions of dollars would go into the pockets of anglers and in turn be partly redistributed to local businesses, and not directly into the bank account of the Kalispel tribe. Then how would they pay the salary of a national Northern Pike Expert like Jason Conner????
At the top of my comment it had a notice saying "Your comment is awating moderation" Who knows. They may post it, they may not. They might think I was a little blunt or too harsh. We wouldn't want to hurt anyones feelings.
"Richard, don't run away from your feelings..." Chris Farley in his little cartoon underwear on Tommy Boy
Well I still didn't see your comment post so maybe you did hurt "Richard's" feelings...
On the same note, I heard that the budget that they were going to actually use and spend to try and get rid of the pike was $4 million over 10 years coming out to be $400,000 per year. Now to kind of piggy back off your comment about the $30 bounty program, can you imagine if the BPA gave a club,...cough cough Pike, Inc...or another pike club, $400,000 to put on a fishing tournament or multiple fishing tournaments and the amount of attention that would attract? Lets say you have 2 tournaments with $100,000 to pay out the top winners with another $200,000 to pay runners ups and have prizes like a brand new lund predator with a 115 pro xs as one of the top prizes.... You could repeat this for the next 10 years...talk about an economy booster.....and you get to reduce the amount of pike.....maybe not to the extent of gillnets especially right of the bat, but I feel it could be done just as effective over the long run...just saying...
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