We have read few things more disturbing than the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recent decision to eliminate all recreational retention of American shad from the Hudson River while continuing to allow a commercial fishery and gill netting to continue. This effective privatization of the shad resource should make the hair stand up on the back of the neck of every person who believes that recreational fishing for personal food is a far more inherent right of citizenship than being able to sell fish commercially, and
who also believes that it is time to get gill nets out of the Hudson.
We have sent the attached letter to both to NY Governor David Paterson and Commissioner Pete Grannis of the NYDEC. (The letter may take a minute to open.) Their postal mail and e-mail addresses are both listed at the end of this message: We ask you to do the following to help correct this travesty:
1. Copy and send the letter that we have written – modified as you may wish – by both postal mail and e-mail to the Governor and to DEC Commissioner Grannis. Residents of all states can do this since shad and the stripers caught as bycatch in these gill nets are coastal migrants and what happens in NY waters affects us all.
3. Bring this issue to the attention of your fishing friends and to the officers of any clubs that you may belong to. Ask them to join with SF in an effort to repeal this regulation.
4. Ask your fishing friends to join SF – as you know, it is free – so that they may join us in other upcoming efforts to make striped bass a game fish in NY and elsewhere.
Commissioner Pete Grannis
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
625 Broadway
Albany, New York 12233-0001
Governor David A. Paterson
State Capitol
Albany, NY 12224
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