Skinned animals wash up on Snee-Oosh Beach

Residents along Snee Oosh Beach near La Conner were greeted with a horrible sight on Monday morning.

The shoreline was littered with dozens of bodies of animals that had been skinned.

“It is one of the worst, horrific things I’ve seen,” said neighborhood resident Stephanie Dickinson.

At first, residents, including Lynn Beebe and Chris Weiss, thought the carcasses resembled otters, which are common in our area.

But no, the hapless creatures turned out to be crab bait that somebody dumped, according to Ralph Downes, one of the marine game wardens with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Downes said there are big mink farms in Canada and also in Sultan and Puyallup raising the animals for their pelts. Once the mink are skinned, their bodies are made available to commercial crab fishers for bait.

The initial call about the corpses on the beach went to Fish and Wildlife as a possible otter poaching report, Downes said. While there are licensed otter trappers, it’s not likely the trappers would dump their skinned carcasses in a place where the public would see them.

“Usually the carcasses are discarded appropriately, and nobody comes into contact with them,” he said. Trappers, he said, do not want to draw negative attention to their trade.

But fishers usually just dump unused bait into the ocean, where it can sink and become a feast for bottom feeders.

In this case, someone used poor judgment, Downes said.

The mink carcasses were apparently dumped on the beach, or from a boat in nearby shallow waters and floated to the beach in a horrifying spectacle.

Downes has seen it before — last year someone dumped skinned mink bodies in the Swinomish Channel. The decomposing carcasses floated back and forth with the tide for several days until the Department of Ecology went out and cleaned them up.