Not only are recreational and commercial fishermen in California, Washington and Oregon no longer allowed to sink their hooks into salmon, but now in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, even the fish's natural predators, sea lions, are being denied access to the fish. Just how does one go about keeping an animal from eating another animal? By killing it, of course.

While sea lions are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, they are allowed to be taken -- legal-speak for harassed, captured or killed -- if it is done to protect fish stocks. An adult sea lion can eat 5-7 salmon a day, and while the animals are suspected of eating about 5 percent of the country's entire salmon stock, they are blamed for consuming one-third of the endangered salmon in the West.

All sorts of measures have been implemented to protect the salmon as they scale the fish-ladder built on the Bonneville Dam -- where sea lions have easiest access to the fish -- including setting off fireworks to scare the mammals and shooting them with rubber bullets. Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service has decided that sea lions seen getting their eat on between Jan. 1 through May 31 can be killed.

Don't get too upset: The animals get a 48-hour window after capture during which officials try and find them a home in a no-kill shelter, like a zoo or aquarium. We still wouldn't want to be a sea lion captured on a Friday afternoon.

New Jersey recently handled a similar-ish situation. Feral cats were killing super-cute, and super-endangered shore birds. After a friend of birds was arrested for killing one such cat, the issue was taken to court where the judge decided that the cats should be spayed/neutered and moved rather than killed. The roles are slightly reversed in this case, with sea lions beating out salmon in the Hot or Not contest, so we expect more outrage over sea lion's being "taken".

Still, we wonder why the sea lions cannot similarly be relocated or why NOAA can't put more money and effort into sea lion-proofing the fish ladders. We're certainly not optimistic that officials will reevaluate the likely root cause of the salmon-population problem: The dams themselves.