What is a transgenic salmon, for God's sake? It is a "genetically modified fish implanted with genes from other fish to increase growth rates". Obvious, you may say. And we have heard of growth-promoters in cattle, haven't we? And in America these genetically engineered processes have produced smolts - the young salmon that go down to the sea about a year after hatching in the river, sometimes two years - in three months and adult salmon in 12 to 18 months. "A time-saving of 600 to 700 per cent." The fish, writes Michael Wigan in the English Field for November, "must grow almost as you watch them". With some understatement he adds that "this is possibly disturbing for the consumer".
A land-based hatchery in Scotland has experimented with this technology under government license. Tough containment measures, we are told, were in place "bacause of the unquantifiable dangers of any escape". He refers to a report, Leaping in the Dark, which "tracks with determination the route by which, weaving through the imperfect net of controls, transgenic production commercially could become a reality, if not in Scotland then in a competing reproducer state. There are no controls, for example to prevent transgenic ova being exported outside the EU." Open sea farming, he decides, is the better idea.
All this arises after salmon farming in Scotland has begun on east-coast rivers, having, in the eyes of many, devastated the river angling of the west coast where salmon farms are found at almost every river outlet. But the bad news is that east-coast rivers are not to have salmon farms. The writer instances the short, broad river Shiel, which used to give 300 sea trout and 150 salmon from each bank. Now it is virtually fishless. And, more ominous, electrofishing in the upper reaches yields nothing. There is no next generation of migratory fish.
The big point for the British Government is that salmon farming yields 1,110 jobs. And, of course, it is argued that salmon angling is practised by privileged people, while salmon farming gives real jobs. All the lines to which we have grown accustomed in light of our own decline. All the unwillingness to look squarely at the evidence of mordant sea lice chewing the heads off the young smolts. Some people don't or won't see what their eyes take in. Open sea farming, according to the writer in the Field, gives the best of both worlds. Thought: is it possible that the disappearing sea trout and the arrival of the salmon farms is a matter of pure coincidence? Some appear to believe it. Not anglers.