It's been a very interesting experience participating in the Cohen commission. We were named in the terms of reference for Cohen, so we're one of only two groups that are funding our own participation in that committee, and it's been a very expensive and very time-consuming experience. But it's also allowed us the opportunity to review a great deal of the science that's been put toward the commission. We had three weeks of aquaculture hearings.
The Cohen commission contracted with four scientists, and we provided them with all of our fish health and sea lice data, dating back to 2002 on a farm-by-farm basis for 120 farms on the coast. The four researchers who reviewed that data concluded that the data were very robust and complete, there were no gaps in the data, and based on the data they reviewed, they could see no linkage between salmon farming, disease and sea lice, and the sockeye returns, either the low return or the high return. There was simply no basis to draw that linkage.
So when you look at environmental effects on wild salmon runs, there are a couple of areas you'd look at. You would look at disease interactions. You would look at sea lice interactions. You could look at escapes and interbreeding. I think the waste question is largely understood not to be an issue if farms are well situated and if feeding is well controlled, which it is.
So if you look at those three things, we're not seeing that we're having an effect with escapes. We keep the fish escapes down. We don't want the fish to escape. Atlantic salmon cannot interbreed with Pacific salmon. They're completely different species, so you're not going to see genetic dilution. On the coast of British Columbia, we've been trying to introduce Atlantic salmon since 1874. Millions of fish have been released through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. Most recently, in Oregon, there was a release of Atlantic salmon in 2010. They simply do not colonize. I think it was quite frustrating for those sports fishermen back in the 1930s who thought this would be a prized recreational fish. So escapes are really off the table.
Then you look at sea lice and disease. These are the kinds of things our veterinarians have complete control over. We make sure that the fish are going into the sea pens in very good health. We can document that, and it's audited. They don't have sea lice on them when they go into the sea pens. We monitor the fish very carefully. We don't see large, unexplained losses. We have a very good record of disease management, with a very low use of antibiotics. Less than 3% of the feed in British Columbia is medicated at any stage of a growth cycle. The issue of sea lice has been so overstated in the public domain that people fail to recognize that we have very low numbers of lice on our fish. We have a different species of louse than in the Atlantic Ocean; they're much less aggressive, and we're monitoring them very carefully throughout their life cycle.
Those are the kinds of things we do to protect the environment.