Let’s kill some endemic fish using Poison, will you?

I bump in to this tourism website promoting so call village life in Sri Lanka and I could not believe my eyes. These guys are fishing endemic fishes using poison and calling that having a wonderful day. (I don’t know where it is, I suspect somewhere closer to knuckles) Looks like they are doing those sorts of things regularly for their foreign traveling clients. There is a picture of a dead fish on the top of the page, looks like a stone sucker and we have 2 stone sucker species here in Sri Lanka and both are endemic. This one looks like a Garra ceylonensis Phillipsi (පිලිප්ගේ ගල් පඩියා).

I don’t care where those poisons come from, a bottle or from a tree or even from the grandmother’s kitchen. Poison are poison. Period. And it is illegal to fish with poison. It won’t only kill big fishes; before that it kills babies, eggs and every other living moving things around it. It is wrong. It is bad. It is terrible.

I know villages should have rights to survive using the habitat around them. But it should not be having a wonderful day to someone else. Even it may be a simple side dish for the villages, but it is destroying an endemic species forever.

I understand we should open our villages to tourists but not to these sorts of things. Feed our guests with Kiri Bath or hoppers even fried Thilapia is most wonderful, but not endemic fishes killed with poisons. This is a crime.