Ep. 829: Who Will Save the Columbia River's Salmon?
The MeatEater Podcast
MeatEater
4.9 • 37.9K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2026
⏱️ 164 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steven Rinella talks with Donella Miller and Doug Hatch of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), Brody Henderson, Janis Putelis, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.
Topics discussed: The Six Sovereigns restoration initiative of the Columbia River basin; having a holistic philosophy and viewing fish as a forever fixture; salmon runs; steelhead reconditioning; chinook recovery; sockeye and coho reintroduction; lamprey restoration; the sea lion crisis; and more.
Feel free to donate to the recovery effort here: https://critfc.org/donate/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
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| 0:12.8 | This is the meat eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, |
| 0:19.2 | underwearless. |
| 0:19.9 | We're going to hunt. |
| 0:20.6 | The meat- to your podcast. |
| 0:22.6 | You can't predict anything. |
| 0:24.1 | Brought to you by First Light. |
| 0:26.6 | When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. |
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| 0:40.0 | That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. |
| 0:47.5 | All right, welcome to the Meat-Eater podcast. |
| 0:49.7 | Today we're going to dig into something of great importance that we touched on a bunch |
| 0:54.0 | times in the past is um |
| 0:55.5 | what in the world happened to and what is going on with the Columbia river and the salmon |
| 1:04.5 | runs I mean this is a story that's played out over centuries historically the Columbia |
| 1:09.8 | I pulled this from your guys' website, the guess I'm |
| 1:13.2 | going to introduce a minute. I had always read that historically the Columbia had runs, |
| 1:18.9 | annual runs of 10 to 12 million salmon. I was reading today, it could have been some years as high, is 16 million salmon. I was reading today. It could have been some years as high as 16 million salmon ran the Columbia. |
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