The maximum penalty for poaching one Chinook salmon – a species that is protected under the endangered species act – is $750 per fish. If officials assessed fines for every salmon killed, Heckathorn could be asked to pay nearly $14m
Fucking do it. Throw the entire library at this fucker.
To be fair, these are tiny juvenile fish, not adult fish which the authors of the law presumably had in mind. The article indicates that only two- to four-hundred of the juveniles were expected to survive long enough to return as adults, which would correspond to a fine of $150,000 to $300,000. Still more than this guy would probably ever actually pay…
“a fertilized egg is a person”… Hm, so a salmon lays thousands of eggs and the male just mass fertilizes last I knew. I doubt the season matters much when they are kept in controlled environments. Wouldn’t they breed year round as their birth place is there home? If so. Jump that number up by a lot. If someone murders a pregnant mother the judge doesn’t say, well there is a x% chance it doesn’t make it to adulthood.
If I go out and kill a newborn fawn in the woods for shits and giggles without the appropriate tags, out of season, etc. it’s still poaching, just the same as if I went out and killed an 8 point trophy buck I didn’t have a tag for, took it home, ate it, mounted it’s head on my wall, etc. That fawn may not have survived, it may not have grown into anything impressive, but at the end of the day I killed a deer I was not legally allowed to kill. The guy writing the law probably didn’t have killing fawns for fun in mind, they probably pictured something more like the second example I gave, but I think most of us would agree that the fawn-killer should be punished just as or maybe even more harshly that the buck-killer.
I can’t think of any good reason it shouldn’t be the same for fish.
EDIT: also, usually with fishing regulations, there’s also size limits, you can’t keep a fish under a certain size, it has to be thrown back. These fish were almost certainly under the legal size. Not to mention creel limits, even if they were somehow all of a legal size, and even if he somehow did everything else legally (which he didn’t,) I suspect the creel limit on salmon is significantly lower than 18,000
Need to bring back forced labor for people that intentionally harm society.
Let them slave away the rest of their days, if they want to eat they will work 12 hours a day. If not they don’t eat and our problem takes care of itself.
That’s literally what For Profit prisons are designed for. And it’s constitutionally legal:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
For the record, that’s fucked up.
He told law enforcement officials he had visited a storage area the day before and picked up a bottle of bleach
That sounds way too premeditated to be explained by simple mental illness.
way too premeditated to be explained by simple mental illness
Ah, you think it was complex mental illness?
In all seriousness though, moving a bottle of bleach the day before is still within the capability of someone experiencing an acute mental illness.
Of course, it’s pure speculation either way at this point.
Why would you assume he is mentally ill? I didn’t see that mentioned in the article.
Firstly, I don’t read any assumption of mental illness in that comment - if anything the comment is rejecting mental illness. But given that there’s no mention of any motive - and the difficulty in even thinking of one - mental illness is very reasonable to consider as a possibility.
This program was doing a good thing for the environment. It has long-lasting benefits for everyone. This is heartbreaking.
Yep same as that asshole that started that wild fire by multnomah falls. Garnish their wages for the rest of their lives. I don’t want them to ever stop paying.
or the guy that pissed in the holding reservoir in Portland. The utility dumped all (I forget the exact number) 7 million gallons or so but his fine was in the thousands of dollars and not what the retail cost of that amount of water would be.
correct. The one I am thinking about but can’t find pre-coffee happened in the past couple of years but I found this one from ~10 years ago (38 Million gallons): https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/17/304128931/one-mans-pee-pushes-portland-to-flush-38m-gallons-of-water
Is there a motive?? I didn’t see any mention in the article other than someone else asking the same question I have, why the hell did he do it?
Probably some vegan psychopath from PETA. They like to meaninglessly slaughter animals to prove their point.
Literally why would a vegan kill 18,000 salmon lol. Vegans try to not kill animals the best they can. Most commenters here kill 250+ animals annually because “taste good” and you jump to the vegans?
No no no look not regular vegans. PETA vegans.
You know, the ones that think cats and dogs would be better off dead than as pets. If you’re feeling too upbeat go ahead and Bing it.
