Nancy Black of Monterey, Calif. pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), specifically the MMPA’s feeding prohibition. The MMPA regulations make it a crime to feed marine mammals in the wild. The prohibition applies to commercial and recreational boaters, and applies to all species of marine mammals.What!?
Have you ever thrown bread crumbs to carp to watch them come up and eat it? Yes? Well you are a freaking criminal.
What exactly did Nancy do?
Some killer whales killed a gray whale calf; they killed a baby whale. Nancy had her crew pull a chunk of baby whale out of the water. She took some of the killer whales food away. She deprived the killer whales of their hard work. Okee dokee. The government seems to be fine with that.
After some time the chunk of baby whale was given back to the rightful owners so that Nancy, the crew, and observers could watch the killer whales reclaim their kill. That was illegal.
How do you comment on this? This is just so ludicrous. Starve the whales, don't feed them and you're fine. Feed them and go to jail.
Shouldn't we see some hippies protesting this?
This is total BS. Used to work on dive boats, and we also took fisherman out at the same time. Those guys would clean their fish right onboard, tossing the guts, etc. overboard. Sea lions would flock to the boats because they knew food would be forthcoming. We had all kinds of harbor patrol, marine biologists, and assorted other government officials come out with us all the time; not a single one ever mentioned anything about not feeding the sea lions. I guess they weren't technically feeding them, as they were only throwing the scraps into the water - they can't control what the sea lions do.
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