Dear Law Students,

Find the Animal Law Conference on Facebook!

If you are attending, join the Animal Law Conference Event page. For questions about the conference, please contact Event Coordinator, Liberty Mulkani: lmulkani@lclark.edu.

Comments Needed to Save Cormorants – Update!

Last month we let you know that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to kill nearly 16,000 cormorants nesting in the Columbia River estuary in an effort to protect threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead. The agency is taking public comments on the proposed management plan until August 4, 2014. If your SALDF chapter is active over summer, or if you would like to submit comments as an individual, information for how to do so is here.

ALDF submitted comment this week in opposition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan. The Army Corps, in consultation with other federal agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), has released a draft Environmental Impact Statement that scapegoats the cormorants as drivers of the population decline of Pacific Northwest salmon. By repeating the National Marine Fisheries Service’s recent decisions to kill sea lions in order to stem the tide of salmon decline, the Army Corps is yet again ignoring human impacts on salmon and instead blaming another species.

In its comment to the Army Corps, ALDF calls on the agencies to follow their best practice of organizing an ethics working group to review the project. Previous projects overseen by FWS have used an ethics working group to analyze the moral implications of killing members of one species in pursuit of uncertain hopes to protect another. In addition, ALDF’s comment explains that the agencies have failed to rigorously explore alternatives to slaughtering thousands of cormorants; for example, the inefficient global seafood trade has decimated coastal fish populations. Please contact me at npallotta@aldf.org if you would like to view ALDF’s full comment.

SALDF Officers

Just a reminder, if you are a SALDF leader and you have not done so already, please send a list of your chapter's 2014-2015 officers with their contact information to Kelly Levenda at klevenda@aldf.org.