If you're a member of the noble genus Oncorhynchus -- generally speaking, the Pacific salmon -- you gotta wonder what those land-dwelling Homo sapiens will come up with next.
We two-legged land dwellers have treated the native salmonids -- chinook, coho, steelhead and others -- to a series of fun challenges. We've filled their spawning and rearing streams with millions of tons of mud, not to mention the trash and poisons of all sorts we've dumped in the water. We've gotten rid of most of the forests that made the streams habitable. We've dammed the rivers, drying up some altogether, because we need the water.
And then we have the gall to say how important and how tasty those salmon are as we hunt down their dwindling numbers. Since we feel that way, we've come up with all sorts of ways to fix things for the salmon.
To make up for the fact we've taken over most of their old habitat, we've set up hatcheries so that we can continue to produce commercial quantities of the fish. Since dams are in the way of migrating salmon, or because our rivers are occasionally not fit for them to swim in, or because of the way we've set up the plumbing in our delta waterways, we pump them by the millions into trucks and give them a ride out to the ocean.