Even after 7 years the power and reach of Bitter&Twisted continually surprises me. The parts of the world it reaches and from where notifications appear regularly on the daily visitor reports I get include many countries with no salmon fishing pedigree, and which many a time even have no salmon rivers within their borders. But, regardless, there is hardly a week goes by without the contact page revealing a few, usually supportive, comments or opinions.

But very occasionally B&T inspires the strangest of correspondents to engage, and the resultant comments are surprisingly relevant, if highly doubtful. The very nature of their content underlines the continuing importance of at least some kind of resistance to the overbearing power of MOWIs propaganda machine.

For instance, subsequent to my #735 post outlining the successful results of the removal of salmon cages around the Vancouver coastline and Puget Sound, I apparently inadvertently rattled a cage. Shortly after publishing I was contacted by Ian Roberts, plain Mr Ian Roberts, or so it seemed, offering to continue my salmon farming education which he advised was sadly lacking and unfairly biased against salmon farmers and their good names. I produce a copy of his comments below;

“Can appreciate your passion, and you are more than entitled to dislike salmon farming for whatever vested interest important to you, but know that if you are relying on Alexandra Morton to bolster your argument, it will not do so. There’s is no 10/20 fold increase in wild salmon returns specific to regions where salmon farms do or have operated, as you suggest. This is just another lie upon lie that she has told in her 30-year campaign. It’s a shame that she still able to influence. unsuspecting yet passionate people to spread her misinformation. 

If you want a list of the times she’s been wrong, I’m happy to share, so you can critically review and make informed decisions. If you just want to believe you are welcome to that as well.”  

My first reply, within minutes of receipt, was;

First tell me who you are, who you represent, why you have info to negate the reports I’ve read both recently and historically, and tell me why you think having toxic salmon farms in the estuaries of wild salmon rivers wouldn’t affect wild salmon.

This isn’t the only instance where removal or temporary fallowing of cages has resulted in a resurgence of wild fish. You’ll need to have some impressive evidence that removing cages doesn’t positively affect wild salmon if I’m going to believe everything I’ve read and experienced over 50 years of salmon conservation has been based on a lie. What salmon farmer do you work for anyway? Regards, Peter.

Followed almost immediately after a short Google search by;

Might you be the same Ian Roberts that left MOWI in April 2024 after 31 years as spokesman and communications director? Thanks very much for your interest in my education but I think I’ll just continue to believe the evidence of my own eyes, my own experiences and the results of other dedicated individuals who refuse to let the MOWI sof this world to extinguish wild salmon and pretend they did us a favour.

How do you sleep at nights anyway? No conscience, or just indifferent to your part in the salmon catastrophe?  Regards.

My initial reply, which I sent within twenty minutes, is attached above, followed by my last reply once I’d had time to do a quick Google search using the simple search tag “Ian Roberts, Salmon”. Try it yourself, and decide if Mr Roberts (late if MOWI)might not have been just a little bit disingenuous in his initial approach, and to have had more than a slight ulterior motive, in truth more than a little “dug in the fight”, than he decided let on.

No reply since from Mr Roberts (late of MOWI) , but the very thought that he felt it necessary, even after he’d ceased to be a MOWI employee, to continue to project such indifference to the damage he helped cause over 31years is troubling. 

But that’s the demon we’re up against here, a point-blank refusal to contemplate change, to admit fault or to accept clear evidence. These people will never recant voluntarily. They need to be embarrassed, forced, compelled and out propaganda’d. Successes like the one in B.C. need to be celebrated, defended and replicated worldwide. They need to be built on and increased. Mr Roberts (late of MOWI) congratulated me on my passion as if it was something childish, misplaced, something to be treated with mild contempt and distain as somehow unnecessarily naive, a weakness to be pitied. 

I’m wondering how much of Bitter&Twisted Mr Roberts (late of MOWI) could bring himself to read before he felt compelled to let me into the error of my ways? Not much, I’m sure, not enough anyway, or he would have known it would take a bit more camouflage than he actually used to protect his identity. Anyway, Canada and B.C. are now climbing the B&T viewing list rapidly. I wonder how many Canadians read the LLAIAs official web blog in the last few days?

Ian Roberts left MOWI in April last year, where he was the Communications Director, i.e. Chief of Propaganda Officer, having been with them for a total of 31 years. As such he’s more than a little personally responsible for, no, is one of the ORIGINATORS of many of the problems the rest of us can see only too clearly. He appears unworried, unrepentant and concerned only to continue his fantasy that salmon farming is faultless, benign, beneficial and misunderstood. 

So, further to his offer to provide me with evidence to confirm that open cage salmon farming doesn’t result in the destruction of wild salmon and that Alexandra Morton is in essence a liar and a fraud, I’m going to give him the opportunity to prove his case by supplying me with the independently collected and independently verified information he says I’ve missed so far. But. I don’t want anything produced, financed or in any way authored by MOWI or scientists allied to them or payed by them.

If the information he provides (if any) is genuinely independent and valid and proves conclusively that I’ve been wrong all these years I’ll post it on Bitter and Twisted for everyone to see and judge, so there will be no dubious outcomes.

If, after analysis and testing of his case against other reliable sources I’m convinced he is correct, I’ll offer a full public retraction and apology. But I remain unconvinced that he will be able to provide anything of the sort and that the view expressed on B&T is in essence correct and my conclusions will hold up against any independent assessment.

May the flames of truth consume all salmon farm producers, SNP politicians, cowardly fishery scientists and anyone involved in maintaining the green environmental myth of the whole stinking industry.

://search.app/ac2vc2u3cPrGxjir5

In Bitter&Twisted post #598 in January ’22 I posted on the activities of Alexandra Morton, British Columbia (BC) fishery protection scientist and the decision of some the BC First Nations (FNs) to tell all salmon farm operators using the FNs land/sea-bed licences to Foxtrot Oscar. This was as a result of the near extinction of wild Pacific salmon of all species which the First Nations relied on for their food and for their year-to-year existence. After decades of the salmon farmers cynical abuse and wanton destruction of the natural environment the First Nations in the Vancouver and Puget Sound areas had suffered enough.

I predicted at the time that this complete removal of salmon farms from anywhere they can affect wild fish on migration would turn out to be transformational and probably the only thing required to solve the wild  salmon problem. And that if it worked with Pacific salmon it would work just as well with Atlantic salmon, here in Scotland.

And now in the link above can be seen the results of these open cage salmon farm removals. In some cases a 10 to 20 fold increase in returning numbers of salmon of all species has been measured, virtually overnight, with no hatchery intervention, no costly habitat works, no dubious scientific interference or fantastical programs to investigate fantasy problems, no excessive dosing of the estuary environment with anti sea-lice chemicals, and no costly legal battles with salmon producers for compensation for spills, escapes, pollution or wild salmon kills.

In fact nothing complicated is required except a swift return to nature and the removal and destruction of the abominable open cage concentration camp farming methods everyone has known for decades were the only real obstacle to wild salmon abundance.

That’s how easy this salmon regeneration thing really is, and has been all along. Get rid of the MOWIs of this world, the “dirty bastard” salmon farm operators, in tandem with those politicians and scientists that for years have supported them and taken a wage in the process, and the wild salmon conservation problem is 99% eradicated. Solved. Overnight. Just like in the really surprising! (FFS) outcome in the link above!!!

Tavish Scott, the SSPOs PR mouthpiece and ex-MSP should be made to swallow every last scrap of the paper edition of the above report, but only after he’s read it twenty times, can repeat it verbatim, and can present a competent case as to why he and his employers shouldn’t be charged with every environmental contravention on the statute books and end their days on a prison farm clean up “chain gang” where they can see first hand and help repair all the damage they’ve caused.

A similar immediate, emergency, non-negotiable and strictly monitored and rigourously imposed total ban on open cage salmon farming is exactly how Scotland needs to solve it’s own toxic salmon farm problem. Just evict without notice the MOWIs, and their like, tonight, and by the weekend give the morally corrupt politicians like Tavish Scott a desert spoon and a toothbrush and get him started on the big clean up.

But what’s depressingly obvious from all this is the total absence of any prominent, or even unknown, professional fishery scientist raising this issue as fundamentally changing the salmon conservation game and throwing their weight behind open cage salmon farming abolition . If the cure is obvious to me, and to most other practical anglers and conservationists with half a brain, it must surely be just as obvious to every fishery scientist this side of the Rings of Saturn. If I can access and analyse the attached report, they can certainly do likewise. So, why the silence. Are they all so cowed, so browbeaten, so ‘feart for their jobs, so lacking in any kind of courage of conviction, so institutionally fcuked up as to be prepared to ignore the clear scientific evidence in front of them.

This B.C. salmon resurgence isn’t a barely perceptible 0.5% or a piddling 1.0% increase, it’s an unprecedented and astronomical 10 OR 20 FOLD increase that can’t be credited to anything other than the removal of salmon farms. This, for the non mathematics, is different from a 10 or 20 PERCENT increase where for every ten original salmon they got an extra 1 or 2 fish. Here, for every original 10 or 20 they had an increase of 100 or 200!!! The timescale for the improvement exactly matches the removal of the farm cages. Either side of the cage removal areas there is no corresponding salmon increase, surprise, surprise. The effect is geographically local to the removed cages and an increase of this magnitude, when everything else either side stayed the same, can’t be otherwise explained.

So why are these fishery scientist so lacking in the ability to stand up on their hind legs and declare themselves. Or are they being threatened by higher authority on the quiet, warned off from supporting anything that looks like breaking ranks with the official line. There must be something holding them back because this scandal is now so embarrassingly obvious that continuing to insist salmon farms aren’t the problem is becoming the new holocaust denial.

I’ve read the full report twice. The removal of salmon cages also routinely reduces sea lice infestation by 96%. i.e. it almost eradicates from the equation any sea lice infestation overburden of migrating smolts. The removal of the cages was not without it’s financial hardships, initially, with the loss of rental revenue, jobs and to the local economy. But the upside will soon be seen, is already being seen, with increased sport angling, increased commercial catches and a bouyant local tourist economy.

Does the Chief Fishery Scientist advising the SNP, who ever he (or she) is, have the balls to shove this report under the nose of Mhari Gudgeon, the Fishery Minister and tell her the blunt truth. I doubt it, not if previous experience of the gutless performance of former salmon policy advisors is anything to go by. At the same time as ignoring this near miracle, scientists spend their time telling us the demise is down to genetics, loss of habitat, climate change, commercial over fishing, anglers killing their catch, etc, in fact anything that protects salmon farming and they can get a research grant to study. Could it possibly be that here’s no money in it for them for just shutting down salmon farms!

But, quite apart from anything else, an immediate total and complete shut down is the correct thing to do, the honourable thing, a route out of the salmon farming scandal and the environmental disaster it’s been causing for far to long. If the First Nation of B.C. can do it, they have shown us the way and unless others back up their courageous stance the salmon farmers and government agencies will weasel out of it however they can. It remains for those with the clout to make sure the chance isn’t pissed away by the likes of the SNP and the SSPO and the Tavish Scotts of this world.

The current SNP government must do more to control open cage salmon farming, a parliamentary inquiry finds.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/17/scottish-government-must-do-more-to-control-salmon-farming-inquiry-finds

Today’s news in regard to the implementation of previous recommendations is embarrassingly damning, yet again, for the SNPs struggling attempts to appear environmentally friendly. Not a thing has changed since the report findings were made public, and today 25% of all farmed salmon die in their open cage concentration camp before they ever get to market.

A wastage right-off of a quarter of everything in the cage, just written off to indifference and bad husbandry, and without even a pretence of horror or regret. Shrug of the shoulders from Tavish Scott and straight off to see his pals at the Scottish Parliament to see how he can get the recommendations for improvement watered down, the looming deadlines extended and maybe organise a nice trip to Norway for the scrutinising MSPs and their families on a nice “fact finder” with all expenses travel, full board and lodgings and a free bar.

The sooner the likes of Tavish Scott, with his personal willingness to undertake any mercenary, backdoor, unpleasant but lucrative job providing concealment for the mankyist, most wastefull, most  environmentally damaging and most unapologetically brutal farming industry known to man, falls foul of his complete indifference to unnecessary suffering the better. His employers high expectations for his useful influence surely now far exceeds his actual effectiveness and it’s just a matter of time before he’s bagged. Is it just me or is his whole supercilious manner obnoxious in the extreme and creates the exact opposite impression than that of an honest broker. You can clearly see his disingenuous nature at twenty paces and it gives off a similar stench as the salmon burial pits into which the SSPO routinely dump their 25% casualties.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/fishing-industry-chief-facing-accusations-34386870

The Ex-Liberal MSP leader, now chief apologist for the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation obviously overstepped the mark, or more likely rubbed an opposition MSP up the wrong way in trying to defend the indefensible.

Shouldn’t be hard to make the charges stick, bearing in mind there’s not supposed to be any lobbying allowed on behalf of vested interests, especially by ex-members of the house now working on behalf of the same organisation most liable to be affected by any decision of the Rural Affairs and Islands committee to enforce more stringent controls.

Let’s hope Tavish is found guilty and gets stripped of his pass, loses his preferential access, and thereafter is excluded permanently from a place he surely has no real right to be in anyway. Especially if he can’t play by the rules. But then he is, or claims to be, a Liberal, and is all for minimal restrictions on private freedoms.

The man’s an out-and-out mercenary. He knows better than anyone the damage his employers are doing to the Scottish environment but he’s prepared to stand in front of cameras endlessly protecting them, and all to save him doing an honest job elsewhere and maybe getting his hands dirty. He’s the worst kind of ex-politician, for sale to any bidder as long as it’s profitable and keeps his face in the public domaine so he can still pretend he’s really important. Tavish , your time will come. The time when salmon farming is finally exposed as toxic and those who supported it find themselves answering for their deliberate misleading statements and actions.

I look forward to him being found in breach of the rules and getting a well deserved and long overdue exclusion from Parliament, which is what I thought we’d done when he failed to hold his seat at the last election.