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CHARLIE WHELAN: Why has angling-loving King given his seal of approval to farmed salmon?





An Atlantic Salmon makes its way upriver against the rapids to reach its spawning grounds.
An Atlantic Salmon makes its way upriver against the rapids to reach its spawning grounds.

One fairly frequent visitor to the Highlands is King Charles and that’s not just to stay in one of his many mansions.

The King likes a spot of salmon fishing and apart from fishing his own beat on the Dee he was also seen here on the Spey just last year.

When I was making a series of programmes for BBC Scotland talking to famous salmon anglers the then Prince Charles declined to be my guest.

According to his spin doctor it was because fishing is a very private thing for him. I wasn’t too disappointed though because Robson Green was a far more interesting guest!

We may never know if Charlie has ever caught a salmon up here but for someone who professes to be such a keen defender of the environment you may ask what else the King does to support the endangered Scottish wild salmon.

Well for a start he is patron of the Atlantic Salmon Trust who have done sterling work in trying to save our salmon.

The King must be very upset then with the Scottish Governments refusal to do anything about the wild Salmon killer fish farms. Apparently not.

The new King has recently granted Mowi Scotland a royal warrant for the supply of farmed salmon to His Majesty the King.

Norwegian owned Mowi is the world’s largest fish farmer and are responsible for mass mortality of their fish and of course mass escapes.

They are also partly responsible for the demise of wild salmon.

If I do happen to bump into the King, perhaps in the famous ‘King’s hut’ on the River Spey on Tulchan Estate where his great-grandfather used to fish, I will tell him what the Atlantic Salmon trust said about open cage fish farms.

They reported that “wild Atlantic salmon can suffer from the open-pen salmon aquaculture due primarily to a combination of harm from sea lice infestations and interbreeding with farm escapees”

If the King doesn’t care about the future of wild salmon then why should the Scottish Government?

* * *

With the recent storms and freezing weather many public events had to be cancelled. Sometimes organisers are over cautious and at other times completely justified in cancellation.

Fortunately the organisers of the Grantown Hogmanay celebrations took the sensible approach and went ahead despite some very inaccurate weather warnings.

They are to be congratulated for once again putting on such a popular and well run event.

A few days later I was invited to the Ross County v Celtic football match in Dingwall. I was confident that it would be cancelled as the temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees Celsius overnight.

I decided to set off anyway and only managed to get there because I used my old Land Rover Defender. To my astonishment the match went ahead even though at kick off it was still -7C!

You have to admire the determination of the Ross County owners in getting the match played even if they got battered on the pitch by a far superior Celtic side.

It’s just a pity that Inverness Caledonian Thistle haven’t been run so well as they have gone into administration and languish at the wrong end of the third tier of Scottish football.

* * *

As the saga of the non running Cairngorm Mountain funicular railway continues it may have escaped your notice that according to the Cairngorm Mountain managers the only reason the rest of the mountain has been kept open is because of the number of Ukrainian refugees that work there.

With the Highland housing crisis there are simply not enough workers to keep things going. It’s only because refugees have been temporarily housed in the Macdonald resort that the mountain has enough workers.

Charlie Whelan (Labour) is former spokesman for Gordon Brown.


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