Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 253

available under European law. They are described by the govern-
ment's official conservation body as 'strictly protected sites'. 78 Yet in
the Cardigan Bay SAC, set aside, we are told, to protect Europe's larg-
est population of bottlenose dolphins 79 and the rest of the life that
persists there, every form of commercial fishing bar one is unrestricted,
except by the laws that apply to unprotected areas. The only commit-
ments in the management plan are to 'review' and 'assess' the fishing
that takes place, to 'encourage' good fishing practices (without dis-
couraging the bad ones), and to ask fishermen to record the dolphins
and porpoises they accidentally catch and kill. 80 That, dear reader, is
'strict protection'.
As a result, beam trawling, otter trawling and, with one exception,
any other forms of industrial fishing the boats wish to pursue con-
tinue there unhindered. There is no prospect of the seabed or the
ecosystem recovering from past destruction as a result of this regime
of 'strict protection'. Nor is there an opportunity for the fish stocks on
which the dolphins depend to rebound.
There is one method - scallop dredging - that is restricted in some
parts of the Special Area of Conservation. With the possible exception
of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means
of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges
operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodg-
ing the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose
underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary
creature in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to
escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth.
Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the
seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges
have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of
shell.
As if to demonstrate what 'strict protection' really means, the Welsh
government decided to let the scallop dredgers into the middle of the
reserve. The government's official advisers, the Countryside Council
for Wales, warned that if dredging went ahead it would be 'likely to
have a significant effect on Cardigan Bay SAC' and may have 'adverse
effects on the dolphin population'. 81 This advice was ignored, and
dredging was permitted within a large square at the heart of the