Please email via the link below!

https://iaac-aeic.gc.ca/050/evaluations/proj/88584?culture=en-CA

Please stop Parks Canada from poisoning fish in the proposed Olive, Kaufmann and Talc Lakes Aquatic “Restoration” project in Kootenay National Park.  Non-native fish are proposed to be removed from headwater systems using a poison that causes seizures and a horrible death.  

Parks Canada is proposing to use a fish toxicant called rotenone that is derived from tropical plants and has been used by Indigenous groups where the plants occur, to harvest fish for food.  

Poisoning fish with rotenone, even if “natural”, is cruel.  It causes painful symptoms and is not a humane method of euthanasia.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11021885/#:~:text=The%20acute%20toxic%20effects%20of,of%20rotenone%20is%20not%20known.

Poisoning an entire lake system is shockingly cruel and inappropriate.  

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1175899/

I have absolutely no idea how poisoning fish got past your animal ethics board. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/rotenone

Parks Canada stocked these non-native invasive fish species as early as the 1930’s with no understanding that they would eventually be putting our native fish at risk. The non-native fish species that were stocked are known to outcompete and hybridize with native fish species. This had led to extirpation of native fish species from their historical habitat and continues to have negative effects on downstream populations of native fish. 

However, these fish are here now, and should be left alone.  Please just leave these lakes as they are.  Humans put these fish in these lakes here, they have no where else to go, and did not choose to be there.  They don’t deserve to die a painful death simply because they are no longer desirable.