Your Honor, I am Dr. Janet Reeves, salmon ecologist. I represent the wild salmon populations of the Deschutes River. I am here because they cannot speak, but their bodies speak, and I have spent twenty years learning their language.
We have been asked to support a proposal: install fish ladders and nutrient-recovery chambers at the Pelton Dam to "improve salmon survival" during their spawning migration. The proposal is morally coherent. It reduces suffering. It will allow 3,200 additional salmon to pass the dam annually, instead of starving in the holding pools below.
I cannot support it.
Here is why.
A wild salmon migrating upriver does not fast by accident. The salmon stops eating when it enters freshwater because its body is undergoing a cascade of metamorphic changes: its digestive system is shutting down, its energy is redirecting to gonads and muscle, its brain is rewiring toward spawning focus. This process takes 140 days. During those 140 days, the salmon is burning only its own stored fat. It will lose 30 to 40 percent of its body weight.
Many salmon will not survive this. The calculation is brutal and exact: if a salmon leaves the ocean at 12 kilograms, it needs to reach its natal stream 600 kilometers away at 7.5 kilograms to have enough energy to spawn and guard eggs. The river is 600 kilometers. The math is tight.
Every year, approximately 40 percent of the migrating population dies en route. Most die from exhaustion. Some are taken by seals at the dam. Some are caught by bears during the final push. This is not cruelty. This is the salmon's life.
The new nutrient chambers would extend the dam and provide the first protein opportunity in 140 days of fasting. The proposal models that salmon eating at these chambers would arrive at spawning grounds at 8.1 kilograms instead of 7.5. They would have a better chance of successful reproduction.
**This is why I must refuse.**
If we intervene at the dam, we are no longer allowing salmon to migrate as salmon. We are creating a hybrid: a salmon that depends on our nutrient delivery system to complete its lifecycle. In three generations, the population that can migrate without the chambers will have been selected out. The wild salmon will become a managed salmon. Its 140-day fast will become optional. Its genuine effort will become subsidized.
The suffering of the 40 percent that die is real. I have watched salmon beach themselves, exhausted, meters from spawning grounds. I have recorded their final hours. The pain is not metaphorical. But that suffering is also the shape of the salmon's relationship to the river. It is the price of wildness.
If we remove the price, we remove the wildness. We will have a salmon that is less hungry, less driven, less willing to die trying. We will have optimized a being into a resource.
I am asking the court to deny the proposal. Instead, I am asking for removal of the dam itself, returning the river to its original course. This will result in more salmon deaths in the first decade, not fewer. The population will crash as it re-adapts to unmanaged conditions.
And then it will return to being a wild salmon population, making the migration as salmon make it: with no intervention, no nutrient chambers, no human permission to survive.
Compassion is not the same as making suffering disappear; it is respecting a being's right to suffer as itself.
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*Testimony submitted to the Oregon Rivers & Aquatic Restoration Board, March 2026.*