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The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
Bonus: The Salmon People Podcast with Sandra Bartlett
Award-winning journalist Sandra Bartlett joins us to uncover the unsettling realities of fish farming in British Columbia with her impactful podcast, "The Salmon People." We discuss some of the social and environmental controversies surrounding salmon farming in Canada including the interconnections between wild and farmed salmon in the region, how sea lice have devastated marine populations, and the ways in which indigenous groups are resisting industry interests.
Date Recorded: 8 May 2024
Sandra Bartlett is an award-winning journalist based in Toronto. She worked as a producer and reporter in NPR's Investigative Unit based in Washington. In 20 plus years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she worked around the world – from Guantanamo Bay to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Uganda, and Israel. She now produces investigative podcast series. The Poison Detectives follows how a firefighter’s wife and a corporate lawyer in different parts of the U.S. get pulled into solving separate mysteries, cows and deer haemorrhage to death in West Virginia and something that could be giving firefighters cancer. The Salmon People, the focus of this episode, tells the story of government malfeasance and industry collaboration to farm salmon on the Pacific Ocean waterways in British Columbia. Verified: Dust Up is about the dangers of Johnson & Johnson baby powder and the risk of ovarian cancer.
Featured:
The Salmon People, a podcast by Sandra Bartlett.
A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming by Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton et al.
What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe.
The Animal Highlight, a sister podcast
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Sandra Bartlett:At the time the BC government, rather than the federal government, was in charge of the fish farms and right at the very beginning they made a deal with the devil. Perhaps they came out to all of the fishermen in the area and the people and the tourism, the guides and that, and they said these fish farms are going to come, we're going to allow them to come, but we, you know, we want to protect the wild fishery, you know, for catching fish and for tours. So can you tell us where the best fishing spots are and we will make sure we don't put, we don't allow the fish farms in those areas. And then, lo and behold, the fish farms were all put in the very spots. You know, a fisherman has his secret spots, his best fishing spot were all put in these spots. And so that right away created a problem that the wild fish are going to be there and the farmed fish are going to be there, and when the sea lice move in and out of the pens into the open water, there are fish swimming by.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to the Animal Turn podcast everyone. This is another bonus episode, and in today's episode, I'm going to be reviewing a podcast and it's called the Salmon People. Now, I first heard about this podcast when I was attending the International Women's Podcasting Awards in 2023, and I immediately started listening and I was blown away. So I finally got Sandra Bartlett, the host and producer of the show, onto the Animal Turn to talk more about it, and that's what the show is all about. A couple of apologies as we begin. I don't know if you can hear, I've been having a bit of a cold slash allergies and I'm still recovering and at the beginning of the interview, I have a couple of sniffles and stuff. I'm sorry about that. Also, about halfway through the interview, there's some drilling that happens in the background when Sandra is talking. It doesn't last for very long maybe five minutes but it's there and there's not too much we can do about it. So I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, as always. I also want to say thank you to Animals and Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple, for sponsoring this podcast, and I'm going to say thank you to a reviewer today. I figured those of you who take the time to submit reviews deserve a shout out. So this shout out here is to Oatmeal Sternly from the United States of America, who left a review on iTunes. Thank you so much for your five-star review, calling the Animal Turn an excellent resource, and I don't need to tell all of you, but he said this is such an important resource for exploring questions about the role of animals in ethics, law and politics. These questions are in urgent need of attention and I'm glad to see this podcast rising to the occasion. Thank you so much, oatmeal Sternly. I'm really happy that you feel that way and that you think that this podcast is contributing. I sometimes feel like I sound like a bit of a blabbering fool and I'm going all over the show with my questions, but I really do enjoy making this content for all of you and I'm happy that you enjoy listening. So thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave that review.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Now, before we jump into the episode talking about the salmon people, I just want to give you a little bit of information about our guest. So our guest today is Sandra Bartlett, who's an award-winning journalist based in Toronto. She has worked as a producer and reporter in NPR's investigative unit based in Washington and in her 20 plus years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation she worked around the world from Guantanamo Bay to Bangladesh, pakistan, uganda and Israel. In today's show we also mentioned some of the other podcasts that Sandra has produced and made. One of them is called Verified Dust-Up and it talks about the dangers of Johnson Johnson baby powder and the risk of ovarian cancer. And a more recent podcast is called the Poison Detectives, which is a firefighter's wife and a corporate lawyer in different parts of the US and how they get pulled into solving a separate mystery related to kind of a chemical being used and cancer. It's very, very saucy stuff and it's very interesting and it's very important.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Today we're going to be speaking mainly about the salmon people, which tells the story of kind of government intervention and industry collaboration to farm salmon on the Pacific Ocean waterways in British Columbia. Over time, fish farms were heavily polluted with sea lice and it's kind of created this huge. I mean, the only way to really understand it is to go and listen to the salmon people. But in today's show Sandra Bartlett kind of gives us snippets of what's going on and I think that this really makes a key argument for why we need to think seriously about the ways in which we treat animals and the numerous, numerous impacts it has, not only for the animals involved, but also for the people and the environments involved. So I hope you enjoy listening and, once again, thank you so much to those of you who leave reviews. They go a long way in terms of helping us to find the show. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hello, sandra, welcome to the animal turn podcast. I'm so excited to have you on the show. The second I started listening to the salmon people, I was like I have to have you on the show. The second I started listening to the Salmon People, I was like I have to have you on because it is just fantastic radio listening, investigative journalism for anyone. I think who's interested in anything should listen to this podcast. I really enjoyed it and I first heard about it at the International Women's Podcasting Awards and when I listened I just fell absolutely in love. So thank you so much for joining me on the show to tell me a little bit more about the podcast and what made you interested in it in the first place. But perhaps we could start off with learning a bit about you. So, sandra, can you tell us a bit about you and how you got into doing this kind of work.
Sandra Bartlett:Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for your kind comments and thank you for having me. I've always been a radio reporter, radio news, and I worked for the public broadcaster for many years CBC Radio and I just did a lot of different things. But right from the very beginning I began my career in the prairies in Saskatchewan I wanted to do longer form. I always felt that there was more to the story that I wanted to tell. And you're in radio news. Of course you're very limited on. You know how long your pieces could be. But even then in those early days there was a national program out of Toronto and I would pitch them story ideas and you know, because I would get seven or ten minutes, which like seemed like forever, and I would pitch them stories and they took a few of them and they had a very good editor who kind of mentored me, helped me learn a little bit more about the craft, because it's quite different from telling a news story to telling a documentary, even if it's only five minutes. So I did that and then I decided I had. Before I started working at CBC I had worked as a researcher for a woman who was writing a book and it was right out of journalism school and she needed someone. She'd hired someone, then they'd left and I met her at the Y. We passed in a hallway and she said, would you be a researcher? And I thought yeah. And she was a really experienced investigative journalism out of Toronto, had come to Saskatchewan to teach at the school for a year and then she fell into writing this book and it was like a graduate degree in journalism to work with her. It was just amazing, not only for the storytelling but how she organized her work, how the meticulous way in which she looked for every fact that she could get to tell a full story about a person's character or the person that she was going to use as a key character in her book. And I was just amazed. She paid me and this is going back a ways but to go into a newspaper library and I had to find a date. And so I went, and this was the days before even well, I think there might've been microfiche, but I sat with this old thing and went pages after pages after pages looking for a specific date and she paid me for hours and hours and I did find the date, which was like, oh God, it would have been terrible if I hadn't found the date, but I had found the date. So the experience with her was just amazing and it just kind of fired me up in the way of telling longer form stories.
Sandra Bartlett:So after that she told me that there is this fellowship that you could get in Toronto at the University of Toronto, what was then called Massey. It's still called Massey College and the fellowship was called the Massey Fellowship. And she said I should apply for it and she wrote me a recommendation and I did apply for it and I thought when I got it I thought you know what? This is my way out of Saskatchewan into Toronto. The rules of it were that you had to go back to your employer afterwards because you can use it as a jumping off point.
Sandra Bartlett:But because I was working for CBC and they were across the country, I figured you know it's kind of the old thing, don't ask for permission, apologize after if you have to. So that that's what I did and I got a fellowship. It was great. I mean I joked that you could take anything you wanted short of brain surgery, because you didn't have to have any prerequisites or anything and you basically audited the classes so you could do the exams and the papers if you wanted or not just go to classes. So it was. It was a really great experience and and during the year, I talked my way into CBC Toronto.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, so you were really pretty gifted talker by the stage you've found. You're clearly an opportunist. You have an eye for there's an opportunity here and might as well say yes and see where it takes me.
Sandra Bartlett:I guess. So I mean, I think that I just thought, here I am out in the prairies, Nobody really even knows who I am, how am I going to get a job? And if I did get a job they wouldn't move me because my job would probably be too low in the totem pole. So I just thought here's an opportunity to do it for myself, and I had to. You know, it wasn't actually fun at beginning, although I would say it was educational, because I had to start at the beginning and I had to.
Sandra Bartlett:I started being an editor, you know, editing other reporters' copy. I worked shifts, really early morning shifts, coming in at 3.30 in the morning and all of that 30 in the morning and all of that. And I wasn't, you know. But I did learn how the newsroom, the national newsroom, ran, how it connected with all of the other newsrooms across the country, and I kept saying to people you know, I do want to be a reporter, I'm a reporter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Go back to your desk. But somehow my repeating it stuck in people's brains. So the odd time when they were really stuck for a reporter and they needed a story, they would switch me out and send me to do the story and so I. So you know, I started getting my little reporting credits and I just kind of developed from there, I and I.
Sandra Bartlett:Over the time I was there I was sometimes a producer. I started producing other reporters foreign correspondents, national reporters and eventually just got a mix. I became a national reporter at one point, but I would switch back and forth. I kind of liked it because you got the travel if you traveled with the foreign correspondents. There's only so many foreign correspondents, so it only so many foreign correspondents. So it was going to be pretty rough to wiggle my way in there, but if I worked with them I would get to travel. So that's what I did.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So when are we talking about now? When you started at CBC?
Sandra Bartlett:I started at CBC in 1988.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:1988. And you were there for almost two decades, right? Mm-hmm, wow, amazing. And so you've been an editor, you've been a producer, you've been a journalist, you've traveled I mean, the list of accomplishments go on and on. How did you end up switching from CBC to doing this kind of long form radio or audio journalism?
Sandra Bartlett:well, when I was still at cbc I, you know I wanted to do this longer form and I had. I was doing some producing of reporters when they did special, you know. You know, on holidays or things like that way they would have longer spaces because there wasn't much news, so they would have like a 20 minute documentary and I was producing a lot of them. And then I started pitching my ideas to do them that way they would have longer spaces because there wasn't much news, so they would have like a 20 minute documentary and I was producing a lot of them. And then I started pitching my ideas to do them and the ideas were taken up and I started doing them. And over time there were shows like the Current, which is still on. I would pitch a story directly to the show, say, are you interested in this? And they'd say yes, and then I'd convince the newsroom to release me to do it. So I mean it was. You know, I did it for many years. I loved it, I loved being able to do them.
Sandra Bartlett:And I had a gap because some things changed. Someone I worked with went to work for NPR. They were starting an investigative unit and I decided that that sounded like a good idea. And there was another job opening for a producer because they were just building this unit and I thought, well, I'll apply. Job opening for a producer because they were just building this unit. And I thought, well, I'll apply, I probably won't get it because they won't hire two Canadians back to back. So I thought, okay, I'll apply for it. But you know there are probably going to be more jobs, so they'll get to see me, meet me. I'll meet them, and then you know the next job maybe I'll get to see me, meet me, I'll meet them, and then you know the next job maybe I'll get. But surprisingly, I got the job and moved to Washington and worked there Again, not doing so much documentary work, but just being exposed to different ways of producing radio was really interesting for me.
Sandra Bartlett:And then, when I came back to Toronto, I just decided you know what, I just don't want to do work for anybody anymore, I want to do my own thing. Everybody has that fantasy and I just to embrace it. And so I was freelancing, I did all sorts of different things and I did some short documentaries for a program called Reveal in the US. It's an investigative program. And then I had a chance to do my first long-form podcast and I grabbed it. And what was that first one? The first one, the first one it was in 2018, maybe.
Sandra Bartlett:It was about Johnson Johnson's baby powder and the risk of ovarian cancer for women who use it and the fact that Johnson Johnson knew for a long time that there was this risk to women and they didn't do anything about it. So I found a woman. She was just in terms of finding interesting characters to help drive your story. She was amazing. She got ovarian cancer at the age of 49. She was someone who basically never drank or smoked. She was really healthy. She ate healthy and she was also a medical, a nurse practitioner, so she had some medical knowledge and she thought I don't fit the profile. I don't fit the profile to get this. What is going on?
Sandra Bartlett:She started doing research and she came across. She was at I think it was at the hospital one of the self-help units and they gave us a whole bunch of you know, read this to understand urocancer and one of them was a book about why, something like, why did I get cancer? And you go through the book and read and towards the back it said it had a list of risk factors for ovarian cancer and she's reading down the list no, no, no, no. And then right at the bottom it said use of talcum powder on your genitals and she thought, huh. So she ran into her bathroom. She looked at the bottle because she thought well, if that's a risk, it's in this book the hospital's handing out. There must be a warning. And I missed it. And of course there was no warning and the book had been put out by the family of I'm just going to miss her name now the comedian who was on saturday night live.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm just losing her name here that's where I go to amy poyla or tina fey no, goes back very far and she was married to an actor I'm just forgetting, anyway, his family they were.
Sandra Bartlett:They really started to fight for getting out the word about ovarian cancer. Generally they weren't doing so much the powder. But when she read that she thought okay, I got to find out more about this and just dove in. And then on the other side of the country was a lawyer whose father had been hired. It's like these things are just kind of so bizarre. He'd been hired he was a patent attorney, I think, and he was hired by a company to determine what they could use instead of talcum powder in their products, in face products, what they could use instead of talcum powder in their products in face products. And because they felt that there was going to be a move by the regulators to ban the product in ban the use of this chemical in the product. And it turns out they didn't ban it.
Sandra Bartlett:But he said to his son, who was just starting out in law you know there's this kind of odd story. You might want to take a look at it. I don't know if there'd be any lawsuits there for you and he began researching and then somewhere along the line the two of them met. I mean, it was great for storytelling because you had these two really determined, interesting people and her lawsuit went through. She was determined to take it to court. She didn't want a settlement, she wanted all the facts to be out in the court and a really strange thing happened. She won her case but the jury did not give her any money. It's never been properly explained. I talked to one juror and I actually think I talked to one juror and I actually think that they were confused about the judges, the information he gave his direction.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, I guess we're going to have to go back and listen, because I'm already. We were here today to talk about the seven people, but now I just want to hear. Now I just want to hear all about Johnson and Johnson and talcum powder, because I mean, it's really, it's really fascinating. I did some research with a colleague of mine and my former supervisor, carolyn Prowse, about some things like infant formula, and you start looking at things that everyone takes for granted as being just safe and surely someone's done their due diligence, and there are controversies lying in so many places where I think most of us would just assume everything is safe, everything's been checked. But that really does sound. I'm looking forward to listening to that. Thank you so much.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And even your backstory, sandra, like I've got to say, you're inspirational in many ways. The lessons I got from listening to you is take an opportunity when it comes up and if there isn't one that comes up, make your own or find a way to get it to happen. And it's really quite an amazing thing. I think many of us feel stuck and just to kind of doggedly stick to what it is you're hoping to achieve, and where there's a will. There's a way. So thank you so much for that, but let's get to the salmon people now.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the Johnson Johnson podcast was your first foray into investigative journalism, and folks on the show or who listen to the show are very much interested in animals and animal studies. So when I saw a show called the Salmon People, you know, two thoughts came to my mind. One this obviously involves an indigenous group of sorts because of the salmon people. But then I wasn't quite too sure how salmon would be included in this podcast or what's going on. But instead of me giving you an overview, why don't you tell us a little bit about what drew you to this? What is the story behind the podcast of the salmon people?
Sandra Bartlett:I'll just begin by saying when you say you know salmon's going to be part of it, but you don't know how, that's kind of the roadblock I ran into when I was trying to pitch it to people. Nobody believed that you could do a story about salmon and make it interesting. It was COVID. You know, everybody has a COVID story. Well, my COVID story was just sitting there and looking at an article from a newspaper and it was an excerpt that was going to be an excerpt from a book that was about to be published, and it talked about this group Now it said it could be the Israeli group Blackwater.
Sandra Bartlett:That is known for doing surveillance and skimming close to the legal line sort of thing. Covert operations, covert operations, yes, and in it this woman who had written this book started talking about how men all in black, in a boat with blacked out windows, were following her around with these cameras, with these enormously long lenses, following her and recording everything. And she said in the excerpt she couldn't believe that this was happening because she was just trying to save salmon. And I thought what? And so then I saw her book. I ordered her book. It's COVID.
Sandra Bartlett:I had lots of time on my hands. I ordered her book and I read it and I thought, oh my God, this is an amazing story. And I did Google searches Like is anybody talking about this story? Like how do I not know about this story and a lot of it, a lot of the big parts of the story that got media attention happened when I was in the US and I somehow missed it. So I called her up and I said I just read your book. It's an amazing story and this is Alexander Morton.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Now that we're talking about right.
Sandra Bartlett:Alexander Morton, that's correct. And I said has anybody talked about making a podcast? She said no and I said well, if you thought you were interested, I'd love to make a podcast. And she said, well, who are you? I told her a little bit about myself and she said well, let me, let me think about it. So I don't know, a week goes by and she calls me up and she's she says I've checked you out, you're okay, I'm in.
Sandra Bartlett:What I found out was it was another one of those life things that are. So you know, a friend of mine, while she was at home with her babies, wanted to work part-time and did research for a filmmaker that Alex knew, and this filmmaker was the closest Alex knew to journalists. So she said to her have you ever heard of this woman? And she said just a minute, I think she's a friend of my researcher. So, anyway, that that was how I got into it and I so I read everything. I started, you know, kind of doing what I do, which is read everything and then cross-check all of the characters and who these people are and just everything, and I tried pitching it to a couple of places, like after I felt I had enough information to say there's this amazing character.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, could you before, I think, because maybe folks haven't listened to the podcast. So before, could you give us that pitch Like the overview, the overarching pitch. What is the podcast? The elevator pitch of the seven people.
Sandra Bartlett:Well, this was a biologist who was working in California at Marineland and she got interested in the whales at Marineland and she started recording their sounds and something tragic happened, which I'm not going to reveal because I want people to go listen to the podcast. But she had been in contact and first of all, I'm going on tangents a little bit, but whales live in pods families and they stick together their lives. So one of these whales in Marineland belonged to a pod in BC. It had been captured in BC. So she was in touch with a researcher in BC and he said, yeah, this pod is here and if you really want to know more about them, you should come up here. So she went up to BC thinking she'd just go for the summer and then go back to California and come up in the summers. And she did work for the summer. But then she started to notice that the whales were not coming back as frequently to these areas and she was a little. She couldn't figure out why.
Sandra Bartlett:Now, by this, this time she had been married and she'd had a child and she and her husband were living in a very remote island about an hour from the mainland of Vancouver Island. I've been to the place. It's a stunningly beautiful place. There's nothing there but the mountains and the trees and the water. It the water. I've never been in anything so beautiful. And they were working. He was a photographer and what he did was take pictures of whales and whales can be apparently quite difficult to get good pictures of because they're skittish and they move all the time, they don't stay in the same area and so it was perfect. They were working together. She was studying their, their callings and and actually creating like a language, you know, on this oh, this is when they're talking about their children or this is when they're calling for people to come, calling for the other whales to come. So she did this research and then her husband had a tragic accident and died and I'm not, so I'm saying you have to go, listen to the podcast and she decided she had to decide do I go back to California or do I follow these whales that apparently have disappeared and gone towards Alaska? Do I go up to Alaska?
Sandra Bartlett:And because of her child was settled in this little village, she just decided to stay and one day a friend of hers came along in his boat. He was a tour guide, a fishing guide, and he plopped this pail on the dock and he said what are these things? I see them all over the fish and it's causing a problem for my fishing guests. She looked at it and she said I don't really know what they are. And he said well, they're all over the place and there's lots of them. They're on the small ones in particular.
Sandra Bartlett:That started a complete change in this woman's life, in Alex's life, and these were, of course, sea lice. Right, these were sea lice, and she didn't know that at first. She had to figure out what they were, and then she decided I'm going to see, is it just in this guy's area? And so she went all around in her boat, scooped up water and little fish, the little smolts, and discovered that they were everywhere. And and so then she thought, well, what's this? And then she realized that they were really, really heavy near these fish farms yeah, this is.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, this was such an incredible revelation in your podcast because I think, as folks who are interested in animal welfare, animal rights, we're quite alert to the fact of things like sea lice affecting farmed salmon, and you see many of these images. Anyone who's ever seen an image of what sea lice can do to these farmed fish's bodies? It's beyond horrific, just how I mean. Some of them, their body, bits of their bodies, have been eaten away by the sea lice. So it's pretty, it's pretty gruesome when you look at the images that are available of sea lice impacting farmed fish. But now a key thing in your podcast is you're saying well, there are the farmed fish that are being impacted by sea lice, which is a big problem, but these are wild salmon that are also now being covered in sea lice and there's a connection. I think throughout the podcast you're following the connection now between, and the battles between, showing this connection between, farmed salmon and wild salmon.
Sandra Bartlett:One of the really big mistakes that was made early on was at the time the BC government, rather than the federal government, was in charge of the fish farms and right at the very beginning they made a deal with the devil. Perhaps they came out to all of the fishermen in the area and the people and the tourism, the guides and that, and they tourism, the guides and that, and they said these fish farms are going to come, we're going to allow them to come, but we, you know, we want to protect the wild fishery, you know, for catching fish and for tourists. So can you tell us where the best fishing spots are and we will make sure we don't put, we don't allow the fish farms in those areas. So people were reluctant, they didn't trust the government, but they thought well, maybe we should cooperate, save our livelihood, and they did. And then, lo and behold, the fish farms were all put in the very spots.
Sandra Bartlett:You know, a fisherman has his secret spots, his best fishing spot, we're all put in these spots. And so that right away created a problem that the wild fish are going to be there and the farmed fish are going to be there, and when the sea lice move in and out of the pens into the open water. There are fish swimming by and they attach themselves to fish. So it took a long time for people to figure out the connection and how bad it was and it's gotten worse and worse all the time. But that was one key decision that was made that really made the difference in what happened to the wild salmon, but it seemed like making this connection was.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know, I was quite stunned. Listening to your podcast was just. This was extremely political, and at all levels of politics. You know whether we're speaking about local people, alexander. You know what Alexandra Morton went through in terms of fighting this at every kind of level, having her name kind of thrown around and through the mud, and she stuck with it and she worked with, I think, local indigenous groups to really fight this. And you speak about how indigenous groups really swayed this fight. It's an important, pivotal moment that they really drove home this fight. But then on top of that, you've got the federal government and you've got the BC government and you've got all of these different agencies that seem to be very much against having it widely known that farmed fish impact wild fish. Could you maybe walk us through some of those tensions a little bit?
Sandra Bartlett:Well, I think part of the problem was I mean, this is just speculation on my part, but there were very bad years for the fish returning, the wild fish returning, and so they had years with. The fishery was reduced, and there was a point in time when they bought out licenses. They bought out licenses, they bought out all the indigenous licenses, fishing licenses, because it was assumed that the fishing, the fishery, was so bad, amazon was only going to get worse and you had. Everybody had to stop fishing. And so I think their thinking was this farmed salmon thing is going to be good. It's going to be, you know, it's going to produce the fish and have some jobs. People can work on the fish farms, they can work in the canneries or the hatcheries. But it seemed like they had the tunnel vision. And then they, because they worked right from the very beginning, they knew nothing. The bureaucrats knew nothing about salmon farming. The companies who'd come from Norway knew everything about it, and so the government relied on them for a lot of their information, and every time an issue came up, they would go to the industry and say, well, what you know? And the industry would say no, no, no, no, that's wrong, there's no connection or they would say we're dealing with it, that kind of thing.
Sandra Bartlett:And for Alex, she started doing her own work and then, of course, she got attacked because she wasn't a real biologist, she was an activist and so she was very smart. She did a few really really smart things. She started working with collaborating with scientists at universities Because she was after a while. Her son went off to school. She had to move him to another school and she wasn't on that island anymore, so she turned her old house into a research station.
Sandra Bartlett:So one of the things that I did is I spent a lot of time. There was an old newspaper, the Fisherman's I'm probably going to get the name wrong the Fisherman's Journal or something like that and I went and found all the archive of it and I started looking from the 80s, when they first brought these fish farms into BC, and I looked every kind of a throwback to when I was working for that writer and looked for that date in the newspapers. I just kept looking at all the stories. What were the stories?
Sandra Bartlett:And right from the very beginning the Fisherman's Union was saying we have a problem. We have a problem with these fish farms and you're giving out too many licenses, they were just. It was like anybody who applied got a fish farm license in the early days, and people who didn't have any idea how to operate a fish farm, and a lot of them, went under. So there was a lot of controversy right from the beginning. It wasn't like people went along with it and then woke up. They were not happy with the folks in the beginning but the government kept insisting it was fine and everything would be good.
Sandra Bartlett:So Alex, you know, when she was doing her research and getting abuse, she opened this research center that brought in the doctorate students, post-doctorate students, and they started working on sea lice and they started publishing papers and they were all connected to different universities University of Toronto, ubc, you know, just various universities across the country. So it wasn't like you know. It made it hard for anybody to say Alex was controlling the research or controlling. She didn't really have anything to do with it. She just provided them with a place to work. But it didn't matter. To this day. Now, what the industry does is they challenge all the scientists. They say all the scientists don't know what they're doing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You see, I thought it was quite interesting, though, there when you said that about you know the industry driving a lot of the arguments, you know, for why farming needs to be done in a particular way, and that anything activists are saying is, you know, hogwash to use maybe a good word there Because you see this happening, I think, across agricultural spheres.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, you see it happening at the moment with bird flu. You know questions about bird flu and how bird flu is spreading. There is a case also in Canada that I'm alert to, you know, with the kind of the prison farms and the efficacy of prison farming and the ways in which animals have been included and excluded there, and I guess it comes down to money at the end of the day, industry has a big role to play here, money to make, and the government relies quite substantially on this. Like I didn't know that the Fraser River, which is where a lot of the salmon that you mentioned throughout your show, that it's the largest producer of sockeye in the world, and sockeye are one of the five one, one of the five species of salmon, and I think everyone kind of remembers the one that everybody loves.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's like the top of the chain in terms of you know the fish that people love to eat which is really fascinating, because you say these companies are made mainly norwegian companies that are busy farming in in canada. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can? Canada is the place where some of the most of the salmon that people consume, or a lot of the salmon that people consume, comes from Canada. So there's this kind of interesting story happening about where people think salmon comes from. You know what it looks like. What I didn't know, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. Sorry, my brain is not jumping around. But salmon's flesh. A lot of people think about salmon's flesh as being pink and orange, but in farmed salmon I remember reading years ago that this has actually died, that they diet because what they eat doesn't really change their flesh in that way. Do you know if that's true?
Sandra Bartlett:It was true. The industry says it doesn't happen anymore, without kind of acknowledging that it did happen. I don't know if it still happens, but you know they are still pink but they aren't as pink. You can really tell the difference if you go into a store that has both wild salmon and farmed salmon. The farmed salmon will be pale pink and the wild salmon will be bright, deep pink. The other way you can tell farm salmon is they have the lines of fat in them. I mean they just look like little white lines and the wild salmon don't, because they exercise more so they don't have that fat.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, so we've got Alexandra Morton and she's doing the research on whales and she comes across the thing with the sea lice. There's industry interests and government interests in making sure that the farms continue. These farms are impacting both the farmed fish and wild fish who are migrating past these farms, and it's impacting indigenous groups who have for a long time relied on and hunted and farmed these salmon and, as you mentioned earlier, had things like their hunting licenses, et cetera, given up or taken away, and so the whole situation is quite messy and political and there's a lot of undermining of Alexandra Morton because she's an activist instead of being a biologist. Now, one thing that seemed to be kind of missing for me or I wasn't too sure if this was part of your story was were animal activists at all involved in fighting the fish farming happening in BC? Did this come up at all? Because sometimes there's a lot of conflicting ideas around indigenous rights and animal rights and who has what and how it works. Did this come?
Sandra Bartlett:up in your research at all? No, I didn't really find any time period where there were people looking after animal rights. But here's the thing. First of all, these farms are out in the water, in isolated areas, so they're not easy to get to, they're not easy to see and even when you get to them they look fine. I went to a fish farm and you know there's these big square tracks with walkways around and it looks benign. The surface's water is flat, you can't see anything. It looks benign. The surfaces water is flat, you can't see anything. And when you go up to the pans the fish are jumping little plops, you hear, and it looks fine. It looks absolutely fine.
Sandra Bartlett:It wasn't until the, the sea shepherd society, which is part of Greenpeace. They offered Alex a ship one summer so she could go around to all the areas she could get to them in one summer, because it's a big area and do testing, test the water near the fish farms for sea lice. And she thought it might be a good idea, since she was going into different First Nations territory, to invite First Nations onto this ship. And they came along with her and one of them, or a couple of them, decided you know what we're going to step on these fish farms. Alex could not step on the fish farms. That was made clear by industry pretty quickly. That was made clear by industry pretty quickly. But we're now at a period of time where we're looking at reconciliation. We're examining how First Nations have been treated, how we want to treat them in the future, walked onto those walkways on fish farms, put the GoPro into the water, moved it around for a few minutes and then came out and looked at the photos.
Sandra Bartlett:They were shocked. That's when they saw the fish with gouges out of their faces or out of their sides and you could see that they didn't look healthy, despite what industry says about how they have so many feet per fish. You could see that they were really crowded and that was probably part of why they were getting injured. That was really the first time that anyone had seen what actually happens on a fish farm, what you know, when you could see below the water. That's when it happened and that happened in about oh, I'm trying to get my dates but only less than a decade ago. So I think that's why the location of the farms, which are in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that once you went to the farms, you couldn't see anything anyway. So how would you know that the animals were being mistreated?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'd forgotten about Sea Shepherd, but of course, sea Shepherd is very much, you know an animal activist group and organization, so I'd forgotten about them. That's a really good example, I think, of how they worked together with you know. The protests that came after that, with Indigenous folks coming aboard the Sea Shepherd and going onto some of these farms and also refusing to leave some of the farms until they were given answers, was really a powerful moment in the podcast and, I'm sure, in the story and the evolution of this kind of battle between the salmon and the salmon people and not the salmon and the salmon people. This battle between the salmon and the people who are trying to, I guess, profit off of the salmon people and not the salmon and the salmon people. This battle between the salmon and the people who are trying to, I guess, profit off of the salmon.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So what happens now? So we've got this kind of story that's arching and where is it now? Where are the status of things now? So all of this is happening. We've got farmed fish that are having a really terrible time. We've got wild salmon that are really being impacted and a whole host of people that are being impacted by the sea lice that are just kind of running amok in the Fraser River. Is this still the case now?
Sandra Bartlett:A lot has happened in the past five or six years. After there was an occupation, at one point a lot of young people boarded a fish farm and refused to leave. They set up tents and they refused to leave. They were there for 270 days. Finally, they were forced to leave by an injunction. But the BC government but the BC government started talking to the First Nations in this area, and that's the Broughton Archipelago, and in the course of their discussions they agreed to give these First Nations the right to look at these farms, monitor these farms and decide at a certain point I think it was 18 months or two years if they should lose their license and leave, or if the First Nations decided that they were being operated in a way that was okay for the fish and okay for the wild fish, then they could stay. And so, over this course again, they got access to the fish farms in a way they'd never had before. They got access to documents and a couple of things that they learned. One was that it was really bad on the farms, worse than they imagined. One was that it was really bad on the farms, worse than they imagined, and that the regulator, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, basically did nothing. They didn't keep them in check on their sea lice, they didn't keep them in check on some of the other diseases. So at the end of 18 months they said you have to leave. And because the fish farms the industry had agreed to this arrangement, they packed up and left. So something like 16 or 17 farms in the Broughton Archipelago closed and that was First Nations making that decision. It didn't involve any government or anybody else. They were given the right to make this decision and they made it.
Sandra Bartlett:In the meantime, the federal fisheries minister had decided that the farms in the Discovery Islands nearby had to close and, in part because the ministry had been given a mandate by the prime minister in 2019, that the farms had to close by 2024-25. So the minister started that process by saying your licenses will expire on this date and you have to start thinking about getting out. And industry, in this case, said oh no, we don't think so. And they went to court. They said that the federal government had not consulted with them enough before making this decision. It was too soon, too rash, it would cause unemployment and disaster. The court ruled in favor of them and said yes, government, you need to do more consultation before you make this decision. So the minister went away and did more consultation and made the decision again in 2022-23. I'm getting my dates mixed up, not mixed up, but just not sure of them. And again, even though another 18 months had gone by a consultation with industry, consultation with industry first and everybody they went back to court. That decision on that one has not been released. That was in 2003, was the court case, and they're still waiting. They expect it may be, you know, at any moment now, but it hasn't happened. In the meantime, the clock is ticking on this mandate to get rid of them and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has continued to consult with everybody and their decision is expected before the end of June because some of the fish farm licenses expire and they either have to be renewed or they have to be told they have to leave.
Sandra Bartlett:There are lots of rumors about what's been happening. I've been in touch, I keep in touch with people. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been consulting, but they seem to be giving more time and energy and money to about half a dozen First Nations that have made deals on their own with the industry to have a fish farm in their community. Now there are more than 120 First Nations who have said we want them out and there's about a handful that say they want them in and as part of reconciliation they should have the right to have them.
Sandra Bartlett:The problem with that is is water moves and fish move.
Sandra Bartlett:If you've got fish farms in one area and there's a sea lice outbreak, the fish that have to travel past that set of farms on their way to the ocean are still going to be impacted by it.
Sandra Bartlett:So everybody is waiting and they're calling on the government to not change the mandate, not allow these farms to stay.
Sandra Bartlett:But no one knows, and they're very nervous now that in fact they will be allowed to stay or they'll be given another break another three years or four years or five years before they have to leave. And the thing is that in the last two years some of the fish that have come back the herring, for example has come back in the areas where the fish farms have been closed in really large numbers. The pink salmon last year came back in really large numbers and this is the first year that the chum salmon will come back and some of the saka and the people who want the fish farms to leave, are hoping that this will be evidence that when they come back they will come back in large numbers and these were the first fish that had to swim as little smolts past these areas where there were no fish farms. So they hope that that will be some kind of proof that if they get rid of the fish farms, the salmon can come back.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Fascinating. I look forward to hearing what they say there. Before we get to your quote, Sandra, I just wanted to ask kind of personally you know, before you started this you said this was a Saturday or Sunday newspaper and you came across this article and then you read a book and now you've done all of this research. You've spent hours and hours of time talking to people doing this research. How has doing this research changed your views on kind of, I guess, on farming in general, but on salmon in particular? Like, how is it? Have you found your views changing at all? What was, for you, really revelatory?
Sandra Bartlett:I hate to sort of admit my ignorance, but growing up in the prairies, especially Saskatchewan, there aren't even very many large lakes or rivers. I didn't really know much about salmon or their lifespan or anything like that. And when I work on a project I just dive really deep and read everything and I discovered I knew that salmon came back to spawn and all of that, but I didn't know how their body changes. I didn't know. It's a metamorphosis that takes place on the way out and on the way back, and and then I hadn't really thought about it. Had I thought about it, I probably would have realized it, how the salmon feed the whole ecosystem.
Sandra Bartlett:And I'm reading all this and I'm like you know, we're all concerned about the climate and the environment and we've all been made very aware of the risks to it. And when I started reading this and learning about the fish, I thought it's really unconscionable what governments have done to the fishery, because they're not just damaging a fishery, they're damaging a whole ecosystem. They're damaging First Nations, culture, people, and in BC it isn't just First Nations who will talk about their culture. Everyone in BC talks about the salmon. The salmon to people in BC is as important as it is to First Nations. And it's only when you realize that that you understand the depth of the malfeasance that's gone on in BC.
Sandra Bartlett:So that really was quite eye-opening for me and it really changed how I looked at a lot of things and I we didn't mention this, but I'll just throw this in that you know, the fish and the fish farms are not pacific salmon, they're atlantic salmon and they have these small pens and in these pens they just basically swim around. You know, a wild salmon travels thousands of miles in its lifetime thousands of miles and lots of things happen in that process. These fish in the fish farms don't get any of that. And when they first started farming fish they did use Pacific salmon and the Pacific salmon died. And then they imported Atlantic fish eggs from Norway and started using Atlantic fish Because apparently I was told by one of the fish farmers, because apparently I was told by one of the fish farmers said they're more passive and they don't mind as much the fact that they don't get to swim wild.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think that tells you a lot about the fish, the Pacific salmon too, I mean, I'm pretty sure the Atlantic salmon mind as well. You know anyone who's subjected to that kind of boredom. We've spoken a lot. I mean, when you speak about violence and farmed animals, you know, often people will think about the overt violence. You know farmed animals are subject to a lot of beating and a lot of just physical violence, but there's a lot of boredom, you know, like a salmon who's, like you say, exposed to a lot of varied ecosystems and they can be quite social and they do incredible feats. I mean, what salmon are capable of is just really amazing. And then just to have nothing but to swim in a bowl in effect, it's a really large bowl and being rubbed up against by others when maybe you need space. Yeah, I imagine they must be frustrated with whatever that looks like. And you know, I don't know if you know Jonathan Balcombe's work at all he wrote a fascinating book called what a Fish Knows and it kind of delves into these various aspects of just how little we know about fish and the ways in which fish experience and move through the world, and one of his opening lines is that there are more species of fish than I think he said mammals, frogs, mammals, amphibians and birds combined, which is just so I mean.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So think about the variety, think about the difference between a human and an elephant and a leopard, and that's just within the mammalian one. Now, yeah, the variety of fish, it must just be mind boggling. Anyway, I, like you, I think salmon are incredible animals and thank you, sandra, just so much for doing this work and for unpacking the complexity. It's a really complex story and you made it, made it accessible in in a way that was entertaining and informative. So, thank you so much. Do you have a? Do you have a quote?
Sandra Bartlett:ready for us. I do have a quote and I think it. You know, I, I, I did the Johnson and Johnson and the. I would say my heroine was a woman and in the salmon people my heroine was a woman. And in the salmon people my heroine was a woman. And I just did another podcast and the heroine was a woman. So I think this applies to women, but it obviously applies to anyone. It's a quote from Margaret Mead and she said never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. Oh, that's beautiful.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And it's so true because I think yeah, I mean, alexandra, she went through so much and I think it's hard that when you're the only one, almost like a salmon, you're swimming upstream, right, you're swimming against the current. There's maybe a low hanging metaphor, right, You're swimming against the current, there's maybe a low-hanging metaphor there, but you're swimming against the current and no one wants to necessarily support you. But in all of these stories, you just find that it's people who kind of stick to it, stick to the idea that there's something unjust going on and if no one else is going to do it, I'm going to do it. And I'm not sure I'm one of those people, but I'm really. Yeah, she is a heroine for alerting us to all of this. So thank you, alexandra if you ever listen to this as well for all of your work. You mentioned your next podcast, which I was reading the blurb to just before we met here. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It sounds fascinating as well.
Sandra Bartlett:This was a podcast about a woman whose husband got. He's a firefighter and he got prostate cancer. And he was young. Normally prostate cancer strikes after the age of 60. He was 48.
Sandra Bartlett:And again to someone who said something's not right here, with no evidence that something was not right, she just was curious. She started doing research and she came across an article about a firefighter who died after being enveloped by fire because his equipment had degraded. And she thought the equipment degraded. Like she didn't know that the equipment degraded, she thought it lasted years and years and years. And so she went downstairs to where her husband's old firefighting suit was and she opened it up and she looked in the crotch and it had all been torn away, it had broken down. You know what it's like when clothing gets so old and it just falls apart. And she started trying to talk to people like she was trying to figure out okay, it degraded, but what is this equipment made of? Like? What would be in it? That would be dangerous and no one would help her and no one would help her. But she just was persistent and kept researching and discovered that it the the material that the equipment is made from has the chemical. It's a chemical family called PFAS and it's a. It's a chemical family of it keeps growing, growing 12,000 chemicals and they're all toxic and they've never been regulated and they're called forever chemicals because they don't break down and scientists think that we all probably have some in our bodies, in everybody's bodies. It's in water, it's in everything in our bodies, in everybody's bodies. It's in water, it's in everything.
Sandra Bartlett:And when she found out that this was in and she found out more and more about the dangers of it, she tried to get the firefighters union that would be your first stop right. The firefighters union can protect you. And they dismissed her. They again, a bit like Alex, they dissed her. She didn't know what she was talking about. She was just a housewife what did she know?
Sandra Bartlett:But she kept going and then she met a man who allowed her to write a blog because she couldn't get the union to talk about this. She wrote this blog in this really popular firefighters magazine and suddenly the firefighters were saying she wrote this blog in this really popular firefighters magazine and suddenly the firefighters were saying whoa, just a minute, what's going on here? And they started asking questions of the union and that started a very long process of starting to remove it. There are now. Initially they said, oh, you can't take this stuff out. It protects them from water. It protects them from water. It protects them from flames. You take this stuff out of the material, it puts their lives in danger. Well, it turns out you can use something else and it doesn't put their lives in danger.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Fascinating. This is called the poison files right the poison detectives the poison detectives, the poison detectives.
Sandra Bartlett:She met and this became part of the story as well she met a lawyer who was fighting PFAS in water, in the water supply of a community that lived near the company that made PFAS, which is DuPont, and his name is Rob Billott, and he was the subject of a movie, dark Waters, where they told the story of the rancher who first called Rob Billott about his cattle dying and no one would do anything and help him. So the two of them met and were chasing the same mystery and were able to solve it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This is fascinating work, Sandra. If I could ever one day have a job like you, kind of diving into these stories that everyone else turns away from and you unpack and you spend time with and really highlight people like Alexandra. It's incredible, incredible work and I'm looking forward to listening to both this one and the Johnson Johnson one. I'll make sure that the names of both shows are in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, for telling us a bit about your work and about the salmon people.
Sandra Bartlett:You're welcome. Thank you for having me on.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you once again to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring this podcast. To Christian Mintz for his editing work. To Rebecca Shen for her wonderful, wonderful artwork that's currently kind of featuring on the Animal Highlight. I didn't even mention the Animal Highlight in the introduction. If you haven't checked out the Animal Tone Sister podcast called the Animal Highlight, go check it out. You'll find it anywhere you listen to podcasts. So thank you, Rebecca, for doing that amazing episode artwork and for your additional kind of content production. Thank you to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the big music. This is the Animal Turn with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Sandra Bartlett:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
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