You don't need to use roe to catch fish. I quit using that stuff years ago and took up fly fishing as a personal challenge after being successful at other techniques. Look at all the fishing reports where fellow fishers are catching coho,springs, and steelhead successfully not using roe but with spinners,wool and spoons. They catch their fair share and get almost as many strikes as the roe fishers /flossers.
Rodney has no problem putting a limit of coho on the beach as do many others not using bait.
I'm not saying to stop using roe bait altogether but to conserve our fishery by using other types of terminal tackle. You don't always need to use bait to catch fish.Reducing the need for roe will allow more eggs to spawn. In a small way this will reduce the need for killing females for bait.
As for seeing a gutted fish in the water,how do you know it was caught and gutted just for it's eggs. Many of us has seen a dead salmon washed into the shallows intact.It may have been gutted after the fact. It may have died from not surviving the rigors of the spawning migration,a poor release from mishandling, or getting off the hook after a protracted fight. The thought of waste doesn't come into question if you don't need the roe and you won't run afoul of the regs if you get caught with roe and no fish to show from where it came from. I've seen this rule enforced on the Stave where a fellow gave the roe from a fish he kept to another. The recipient was then busted by DFO on site who witnessed the transaction for contravening the regs and recieved a ticket.