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Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: ledhendrix on 12 Jan 2008, 15:52
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This is the thread for talking about fishing.
I started fishing when i was about 8. Me and my dad would go up to the hill lochs around where i live and he would fly fish and i would use a small spinning rod. I hardly ever caught anything but it was always great when i did and i enjoyed it greatly anyway. I progressed to fly fishing when i was about 12, then didn't go fishing much. 3 or 4 years ago i got right back into fishing and i started fly tying. I mostly go fly fishing for brown trout in the lochs around where i live. Occasionally i will go fishing for sea trout in a river near where i live or i will go down to the bay and fish there.
I practise catch and release and will occasionally keep a fish to eat but very rarely as i don't like killing things.
My biggest trout to date caught on the last day of the season last year, it went back.
(http://file035b.bebo.com/5/large/2007/10/13/18/15656824a5812298613l.jpg)
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I am really not trying to be mean but holy SHIT will this be a boring thread.
Anyway I used to fish often, but I now can't bring myself to do it, even though I know it is very fun. I hate hurting stuff.
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For a second I read the title as "fisting talk"
I'm not sure which would be better.
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So is this like real fishing? Do we have to be drunk before we come in here?
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I have had a fly rod for years and only last year learned how to use it.
I'd always used a spinner rod before that, and the relationship is so much more active fly fishing. That said, I am terrible at fly fishing.
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One time I caught a fish THIS BIG!
(http://images.jupiterimages.com/common/detail/73/30/22133073.jpg)
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When I was wee I used to catch little crappie and brim and stuff all the time when I would go fishing with my uncle and his son up in the north georgia mountains. And then when I was 7 years old I caught a huge 8lb large-mouth bass that my mother had mounted on a plaque, and to this day I have never caught another fish.
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one time i went fishing. i caught a fish.
after we caught fish, we put them into a bucket full of water. i was really excited because i thought we were going to keep them as pets.
it turned out that we were actually going to eat them. i cried.
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I am really not trying to be mean but holy SHIT will this be a boring thread.
There are actually fishing games. They can actually bore people to death.
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When I lived in Texas my dad and brothers and me used to go on semi-annual fishing trips to the Gulf of Mexico, where we would meet up with his old sailing buddy and go fishing out on the Ocean for Marlin, bull reds, black drums, the odd shark. We'd also go as much as we could when we were up in Lubbock, but being as most of the lakes around Lubbock are man-made.... We would also fish for crappie and bluegill, sunperch and smallmouth bass in the small lake near where my grandmother lived, and we'd set out trot-lines for catfish. That lake actually had really good fishing, but we visited her about as much as we went to the Guld of Mexico.
Up here we've sorta given up. Don't have the money to go out on the Chesapeake, wouldn't want to keep what was caught there anyway, and none of the lakes has ever yielded so much as a bite for me in the nearly 3 years I've been here now.
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I've been fly fishing for about 11 years now, all spinning before that.
ledhendrix: Nice fish =) Mind me asking what fly you were using?
Photo of me with a good lake erie rainbow:
(http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c255/colinmorell/020.jpg)
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All of you retarded people who go "waaaah I wouldn't want to hurt the cute adorable fishies" have obviously never been to and eaten of a proper southern fish fry.
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Agreed. A lot of my family lives in Alabama, and we have a fish fry every time we visit. I have never tasted anything better in my life.
We go fishing in Cedar Creek, and catch a lot of white perch. There are tons of them, and if we get enough, we eat.
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or to a Lousiana seafood boil for that matter, though that's mostly clams, shrimp and crawfish. Still fuckin' good.
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All of you retarded people who go "waaaah I wouldn't want to hurt the cute adorable fishies" have obviously never been to and eaten of a proper southern fish fry.
Being from Florida I have eaten at hell-of fish fries. I don't like to catch the fish myself, though. I'll see it, but I don't wish to be the one harming it.
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Catch and release fishing is like playing paintball with wild game except the animals don't know it's a game and they think you're trying to kill them.
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Catch and release fishing is like playing paintball with wild game except the animals don't know it's a game and they think you're trying to kill them.
except catch and release fishing is done for the aesthetic beuty of the outdoors, and the complete angling experience, not just some base pleasure derived from cruelty.
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There is nothing like taking the fish you just caught by the "neck", bashing it against the side of a rock until it stops jerking, and then throwing it into the cooler. Or if you're on boat with a livetank I guess toss em in, wait until you're done fishing, the chop their heads off their sitll living bodies, gut them while they're still moving, scrape the knife along the insides to get the guts out and then take a hose and rinse em, putting the finished job in Ziploc baggies in a cooler. And if after all that you still wanna eat 'em, you are a true fisherman.
And really, if you get worked up over a fish, my god man.
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except catch and release fishing is done for the aesthetic beuty of the outdoors, and the complete angling experience, not just some base pleasure derived from cruelty.
So the aesthetic beauty of the outdoors entails jerking a creature from its natural habitat to a place it quite literally suffocates in, just to put it back in a bewildered and frantic state.
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I imagine their day otherwise is pretty god damn boring, at least with lake fish.
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I love the aesthetic beauty of the outdoors, though I must admit I've never had any angling experiences.
What irks me about catch-and-release is the attitude that it's more humane than regular. Sure, you aren't killing them, but the point has been made that our lovely little atmosphere suffocates them. Regardless of your connection to the outdoors at the time, the fish is not your friend, it is a floppy little fish, gasping for air.
I guess I just like the thought of killing an animal for function more than harassing it for fun.
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Hear, hear!
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*unless that animal is a calenlass. Then I am all about catching them on hooks an selectively suffocating them.
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Slick, baby, I have many kinks, but unfortunately that is not one of them. I am sorry. Try again.
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What irks me about catch-and-release is the attitude that it's more humane than regular. Sure, you aren't killing them, but the point has been made that our lovely little atmosphere suffocates them.
Not to mention that unless you're fishing with a net, the catching of a fish involved putting a fucking hole in the side of its face.
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...and I thought it was love.
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Steve-O put a hook in the side of his mouth, it looked like the worst thing someone could possibly do to themselves besides the Pain Olympics. And that thing wasn't even barbed, fish are in for a bad day if they're going to get caught at all. Of course, they'll forget about it within a few days.
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Here's me with a Northern I caught this summer in western Ontario.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v368/thehollow/IMG_2661.jpg)
Forgive the image, I had to take a picture of the picture, I didn't have a digital copy of it.
Man, I look really bad in hats. The lack of hair + full beard makes my face look really fat.
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i mined for fish once... does that count?
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How about you put on some scuba gear, stand underwater, and catch a bear with your rod. Reverse fishing!
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Not to mention that unless you're fishing with a net, the catching of a fish involved putting a fucking hole in the side of its face.
QFT
If you're gonna catch and release, you might as well go to a damn aquarium and stare at the fishtank. Fishing, hunting; do it to solidify your place in the food chain and eat what you kill. I would be pissed if a bear mauled my ass and didn't have the common courtesy to use my bleeding carcass to feed itself or it's young.
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Interesting. Me, I wouldn't be pissed, I would be rather happy that I survived a bear mauling.
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My most insane fishing i ever did, i was getting paid for!
I caught around 1500kg of turbot, in 4 consequetive days!
(yes, i was working at a turbotfarm, shut up, beat my epic volumes of caught fish)
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ledhendrix: Nice fish =) Mind me asking what fly you were using?
Was caught on a bibo, probably one of my favorite flies.
Not to mention that unless you're fishing with a net, the catching of a fish involved putting a fucking hole in the side of its face.
QFT
If you're gonna catch and release, you might as well go to a damn aquarium and stare at the fishtank. Fishing, hunting; do it to solidify your place in the food chain and eat what you kill. I would be pissed if a bear mauled my ass and didn't have the common courtesy to use my bleeding carcass to feed itself or it's young.
Yeah but staring at a fish tank is hardly going out into the countryside. You could argue that locking something up in a fish tank and taking it from its natural place in the wild is just as bad. Most people involved in fly fishing are also quite concerned about the welfare of the fish they catch, even if it is purely because they enjoy catching the fish at least they are taking an active stance in stopping them from becoming endangered. Take salmon over in Scotland, if it wasn't for anglers their stocks would be even more dramatically reduced than they are now. Netting and fish farming are incredibly detrimental to salmon stocks and where this has been stopped because of the actions of anglers fish stocks are increasing. A prime example is the increasing salmon and sea trout stocks on the east coast of Scotland where most farming and netting has been stopped because of angling pressure, whilst on the west coast of Scotland where there are still huge amounts of fish farming and netting wild salmon and sea trout stocks are still on the decline.
Would you rather people just ignored where there food came from and turned a blind eye to what was happening because they don't see the effects first hand or would you rather people went and did something they enjoyed, that gets them outdoors and gets them "in touch" with nature and are actually helping a good cause?
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Personally I'd rather humans had the good sense to start eating something else when the food they like gets so rare that it's difficult to catch and/or prohibitively expensive. Humans are the only predators on the planet that, when faced with a situation in which one of their prey animals is becoming increasingly depopulated and difficult to catch, will continue hunting for that animal regardless, rather than switching to another animal and giving the first one a chance to get its numbers up again.
As for catching fish being an excuse to go into the wild, well . . . I accompanied a friend of mine a few weeks ago while she was fishing on the New South Wales coast. She didn't catch anything, and when it started getting dark and we decided to head home she chucked what was left of her bait into the water. All of a sudden the water was alive with a myriad of crabs and tiny baby fish. Saw 'em all. Right out there in the wild. Didn't have to catch a one of them.
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I've never really understood the catch-and-release mentality. The key factor here for me is that fresh caught fish is basically the tastiest thing ever. If you can get a trout into a frying pan within ten minutes of the time you end its life then you are in for a fantastic meal. I've never gone fly fishing without the intention of eating what I catch, though of course many of those trips ended with me not keeping anything because all I caught was small little fish without enough meat on them to be worth keeping (or to keep legally).
I haven't been fishing since I snapped my fly rod in half a couple years ago when I tripped and caught the tip of it under a rock, but my dad got it replaced for me for Christmas, and there are some great rivers down here in Southern Oregon, so I am GREATLY looking forward to this coming spring and some tasty tasty trout.
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Personally I'd rather humans had the good sense to start eating something else when the food they like gets so rare that it's difficult to catch and/or prohibitively expensive.
You're absolutely right, but recreational fishing doesn't put the survival of species into jeopardy. Recreational fishermen want to make sure that those fish are around for a long time. This is why the individuals most instrumental in establishing conservation laws and ethics have been fishermen and hunters. Aldo Leopold and Roosevelt are good examples.
Not to mention that unless you're fishing with a net, the catching of a fish involved putting a fucking hole in the side of its face.
QFT
If you're gonna catch and release, you might as well go to a damn aquarium and stare at the fishtank. Fishing, hunting; do it to solidify your place in the food chain and eat what you kill. I would be pissed if a bear mauled my ass and didn't have the common courtesy to use my bleeding carcass to feed itself or it's young.
Inlander- Fish aren't human beings. A small hole from a small barbless hook (which do not go anywhere near the whole way through the mouth of a fish) and a few seconds out of the water are not the same level of cruelty as torturing a dog or housecat. This is a touchy subject among fisherman though, causing a lot of recent study into whether or not fish have a memory for trauma, and if they do how long it lasts. Some have even claimed that fish do not feel pain in their mouths, as a hooked fish, if no tension is kept on the line, will go back to feeding and acting normally. It is the pull of the line, not the hook, the causes the distress.
DonInKansas- I don't know if you've ever been a part of an organized sport, or if you enjoyed it, but the best way I can describe why just hiking or looking at fish isn't the same thing as fishing is to say this: the difference between looking at fish and fishing is the difference between staring at a football field with gear laying on it (or lacrosse, soccer ect) and actually playing the game. All the same elements are there, it should be just as rewarding right?
I've never really understood the catch-and-release mentality. The key factor here for me is that fresh caught fish is basically the tastiest thing ever. If you can get a trout into a frying pan within ten minutes of the time you end its life then you are in for a fantastic meal. I've never gone fly fishing without the intention of eating what I catch, though of course many of those trips ended with me not keeping anything because all I caught was small little fish without enough meat on them to be worth keeping (or to keep legally).
I haven't been fishing since I snapped my fly rod in half a couple years ago when I tripped and caught the tip of it under a rock, but my dad got it replaced for me for Christmas, and there are some great rivers down here in Southern Oregon, so I am GREATLY looking forward to this coming spring and some tasty tasty trout.
I've never really understood the catch-and-release mentality. The key factor here for me is that fresh caught fish is basically the tastiest thing ever. If you can get a trout into a frying pan within ten minutes of the time you end its life then you are in for a fantastic meal. I've never gone fly fishing without the intention of eating what I catch, though of course many of those trips ended with me not keeping anything because all I caught was small little fish without enough meat on them to be worth keeping (or to keep legally).
I'm the opposite. I Haven't kept a fish Ive caught in 4 or 5 years.
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When I was little, we were at a charity fishing derby at a local pond and we caught the exact same fish over a dozen times. I swear to god.
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That is a pretty goddamn stupid fish.
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That, or the wee little Iron-O didnt realize yet that a individuals of a species of fish, look very much alike.
(well, to kids... for me, im afraid i get giddy about the behaviour of specific individuals, with as best example, one of the lumpsuckers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpsucker) i had in the aquarium at school, swimming along, getting caught in the stream of the pump, making a bunch of loops before beeing able to swim out (they arent that agile), and then going "wheee, that was fun!" and swimming into the thing again, to do more loops!)
:-D
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While individual fish of the same species *can* look very similar, I know for a fact that when fishing in a river I've caught the same fish four separate times once (the hook marks were kind of a giveaway that it was, in fact, the same idiot of a fish). "Four" is not "over a dozen", but it makes me less inclined to completely reject the claim.
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All fish look alike.
Fucking racist.
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I went fishing with my grandpa a few times. A bluegill looks nothing like a bass.
I don't fish anymore, though, because my grandpa died and I don't feel like sitting in a boat with my two uncles that do.
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Fish aren't human beings. A small hole from a small barbless hook (which do not go anywhere near the whole way through the mouth of a fish) and a few seconds out of the water are not the same level of cruelty as torturing a dog or housecat.
I've heard this argument before. I find it highly doubtful and incredibly convenient. I know it's been studied, but not being an ichthyologist I don't know the extent of the study; however, I do know that feeling pain or experiencing trauma are real and vital biological processes. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes absolutely no sense to me to suppose that a fish can't feel pain.
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That, or the wee little Iron-O didnt realize yet that a individuals of a species of fish, look very much alike.
Nah, this may sound cruel, but we saw marks from the other time it was caught. It was just one freaking stupid fish.
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I've heard this argument before. I find it highly doubtful and incredibly convenient. I know it's been studied, but not being an ichthyologist I don't know the extent of the study; however, I do know that feeling pain or experiencing trauma are real and vital biological processes. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes absolutely no sense to me to suppose that a fish can't feel pain.
While I'm not arguing for the validity of the "fish can't feel pain" point, there are certainly spots on the human body that have very little feeling. Perhaps fish lips aren't very sensitive.
Gills probably are, though. I caught a rainbow trout on a mountain in upstate NY (near Keene) by hooking it through the gills. My dad said if I caught anything we could take it home, but didn't have a bucket 'cause he assumed I wouldn't catch anything.
Darn fish probably bled to death. Didn't get to eat it or anything.
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The part I have difficulty with most is that as soon as they are taken out of the water, they are suffocating. And if you don't throw them back or put them in a bucket soon enough, they die. Fishing when you don't plan on keeping what you catch to eat it is pretty much cruel. Anytime I went, we brought a bucket and my g-pa had a cage permanently fixed to the dock on his pond/lake, because he went fishing several times a week, so that if he forgot a bucket, he could get one and then come back.
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Humans are the only predators on the planet that, when faced with a situation in which one of their prey animals is becoming increasingly depopulated and difficult to catch, will continue hunting for that animal regardless, rather than switching to another animal and giving the first one a chance to get its numbers up again.
You're kidding, right? You think that a hungry wolf will see a rabbit and think "I better let that one go. Rabbits are getting pretty scare around here. Maybe I'll hold out for a raccoon or something."?
Animals, especially hungry ones, function on instinct alone. Hungry + food = eat. That's it. There is no fucking way that a predator other than man ever thinks about passing up a meal because its numbers are getting low. There are at least some humans out there who do.
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Good point Orbert, altough you happen to be conveniently forgetting the entirety of the Lotka-Volterra model/equations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation), which neatly explains the relationship between predators (and their population) and their prey (and their population).
Basically, if a predator finds low amounts of prey, they will reproduce less offspring (what with beeing to busy to get preggers and all), and the amount of predators in a certain area, will go down as well, untill it reaches a certain point at which the predation-pressure on the prey-population is low enough to allow it to recover back to its pre-bad-times place. A short delay after this, the population of the predators will also rise again, and the whole cycle starts over again.
Problem ofcourse with humans, is that our population has been on the rise for the last, oh, i dunno, millenium?
Aaaanyway, you can return back to the fishies now >.>
p.s. This is what you get for having a dutchie on the forum who had to study this at school. I actually bet im not the only one... Ohwell :D
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Yes but scarce prey implies hard-to-find. If they can't find it, they can't eat it. That's why, using the wolf example, when the lemmings in Alaska go through population lulls the wolf population shrinks for a few years, too.
Edit: Fuck you, Vergo. Quit stealing my thundah.
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Humans are the only predators on the planet that, when faced with a situation in which one of their prey animals is becoming increasingly depopulated and difficult to catch, will continue hunting for that animal regardless, rather than switching to another animal and giving the first one a chance to get its numbers up again.
You're kidding, right? You think that a hungry wolf will see a rabbit and think "I better let that one go. Rabbits are getting pretty scare around here. Maybe I'll hold out for a raccoon or something."?
Animals, especially hungry ones, function on instinct alone. Hungry + food = eat. That's it. There is no fucking way that a predator other than man ever thinks about passing up a meal because its numbers are getting low. There are at least some humans out there who do.
Exactly. Harry, as a fellow biology degree holder you should know better than to confuse statistical environmental processes with conscious intentionality. The fact that a community of predators as a whole switches to new prey isn't because anyone has decided to help out old prey but because everyone still hunting the old prey has died of hunger.
This isn't to say your argument is wholly without merit, but rather that you are misleading people about the details. We shouldn't look to other predators in the animal world for examples of how to behave, but rather as cautionary examples of how not thinking things through when killing others can come back to bite you.
ADDITION: @verergoca+calenlass - There is a big difference between hunting going down because the hunters are choosing to exercise restraint, and hunting going down because the population of hunters has gone down. Note that the first paragraph of my post assumes people already know about what you posted, but points out how that is a separate issue.
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Way to put the Mod with a scarf in his place.
I tried fishing a couple years ago. Didn't catch anything for two days, and my uncle caught two trout. Fresh fish is pretty damn delicious, but I couldn't put myself through that emotional gauntlet again.
I'll stick to hunting rabbits.
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The part I have difficulty with most is that as soon as they are taken out of the water, they are suffocating. And if you don't throw them back or put them in a bucket soon enough, they die. Fishing when you don't plan on keeping what you catch to eat it is pretty much cruel.
I'm unsure why it's seen as less cruel if you eat them afterwards, a view that seems to have come up a few times in this thread. Genuinely, I don't get the difference, they're both just doing it for fun basically. It's not like anybody needs to be eating fish. What am I missing here?
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ADDITION: @verergoca+calenlass - There is a big difference between hunting going down because the hunters are choosing to exercise restraint, and hunting going down because the population of hunters has gone down. Note that the first paragraph of my post assumes people already know about what you posted, but points out how that is a separate issue.
Yes, but the reason for the hunting population dying off is the same, at least in the example I used, where the wolves have very limited choices of prey: scarcity.
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EDIT: Has anyone ever provided a good explanation for why this forum doesn't have a delete function?
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Not that I know of, no.
I enjoy fishing, just not ice fishing. That is boring as hell. But if it's a nice summer day, going out in the boat and staying until dusk is really releaxing and also fun, even if you don't catch anything. And if you do, you take them home, fillet them, and have fresh fish for supper. Yum. These are good times.
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People often forget that the majority of time spent fishing is waiting. Of course, that's why you do it on a nice day in a boat over beautiful water, or with friends or family that you can get along with, laugh, drink a few beers and listen to a baseball game on the radio at the same time. If you spend your entire time fishing looking intensely at the water screaming in your head "bite it! Bite it you bastard!" you're missing a lot of the point.
Ice fishing is something I've always wanted to try. I mean, sure it'd be a bit boring and cold, but once again I wouldn't want to do it without a couple people to provide some laughs and vodka.
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To be honest, i haven't done a lot of fishing in my life, but the last time I did was this summer when an influx of whitebait along Hastings beach caused incredible amounts of Mackerel to come really close to the shore. Like, they were jumping out of the water about four or five metres away, it was incredible. I was down there with my sister, my aunt and my cousin, and we walked to the beach shops up in the old town just to get nets so that we could catch some whitebait. It was so ridiculously easy to heave them out of the water, and after a while my cousin's dad Mick showed up. He saw the fish, went to the nearest tackle shop and bought himself a new rod so that he could start fishing.
I swear to god, we caught over 30 mackerel in about two hours. For a while he was just stood there on the beach, casting, reeling in, and bringing in 3 fish at a time, sometimes four when two bit the same hook. It was incredible. Everyone had a go, and my cousin had such a blast when she caught her first fish. My aunt, Mick and my cousin stayed at the beach and barbequeued their fish after gutting them then and there, whereas we left and brought ours home in a cooler. I gutted them and cooked them for dinner, they were absolutely delicious. Fresh fish is amazing, and it's that much better when you've caught it yourself.
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yeah, at times like that the fun really does just come from the excitement of reeling in tons of fish.
In the springtime around Pine Lake (where my grandmother used to live) the sunperch and smallmouth bass perch would be in the thousands close to the shoreline, and you could catch a good 30 or 40 of them a day. Not the best eating, but then those are the ones you fry up so much their meat falls off the big bones, and the little ones more or less become edible, so its still worth it. My best time ever fishing though is at night on one of the rotting old piers with my dad and brother and an old lantern that lights up the spider webs with giant orb weavers hanging in them on the posts out in the water, and fishing for channel cats along the shore and checking the trot lines in the middle of the night for hard heads out on the water. Down around that part you see a lot of snakes and sometimes small alligators out in parts of the water, making it feel dangerous and exciting to basically harvest fish the easy way. I need to get a house next to a lake or bay someday so I can do that again with my kids if I should ever have any.
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Good point Orbert, altough you happen to be conveniently forgetting the entirety of the Lotka-Volterra model/equations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation), which neatly explains the relationship between predators (and their population) and their prey (and their population).
I wasn't conveniently forgetting the LV equation. It just isn't relevant here.
The implication (which has since been thrashed to death, but I never got a chance to respond) was that the predators in the wild were somehow choosing to pursue different prey, or at least that's how I read it. It struck me as a pretty bizarre thing to say, so I rebuked it.
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The part I have difficulty with most is that as soon as they are taken out of the water, they are suffocating. And if you don't throw them back or put them in a bucket soon enough, they die. Fishing when you don't plan on keeping what you catch to eat it is pretty much cruel.
I'm unsure why it's seen as less cruel if you eat them afterwards, a view that seems to have come up a few times in this thread. Genuinely, I don't get the difference, they're both just doing it for fun basically. It's not like anybody needs to be eating fish. What am I missing here?
To understand this you have to understand the evolution of the arguments non-fishers use to accuse fisherpersons of cruelty. First they said we kept too many fish and the barbs on hooks hurt the fish, this (along with the trend of increasingly environmentally- conscious sportspersons) gave rise to catch and release fishing with barbless flies. Then they said we wore their protective slime off when we brought the fish to hand and suffocated them so we invented tools like the ketchum release (which I use) so the fish never even have to leave the water, and are never touched. Now, faced with fishermen who never touch the fish, never take it from the water, use barbless hooks which are usually smaller than 1/2in long and 1/8in between the barb and shank, they tell us that fishing at all, unless we kill the fish, is cruel. The only option we're left with is to say "fuck you", or stop fishing, since we don't want to kill any fish. To be fair, I am referring to fly fisherpersons here, but the same trends of barbless hooks and catch and release fishing is taking hold in bait and lure fishers as well.
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I do both and you know what? When I catch and release I used the same hooks I use when I catch them to kill, and I handle them roughly, and maybe I'm cruel. Oh well. Fuck sportsmanship, they should be feeling lucky to be alive after I'm done with them.
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To understand this you have to understand the evolution of the arguments non-fishers use to accuse fisherpersons of cruelty. First they said we kept too many fish and the barbs on hooks hurt the fish, this (along with the trend of increasingly environmentally- conscious sportspersons) gave rise to catch and release fishing with barbless flies. Then they said we wore their protective slime off when we brought the fish to hand and suffocated them so we invented tools like the ketchum release (which I use) so the fish never even have to leave the water, and are never touched. Now, faced with fishermen who never touch the fish, never take it from the water, use barbless hooks which are usually smaller than 1/2in long and 1/8in between the barb and shank, they tell us that fishing at all, unless we kill the fish, is cruel. The only option we're left with is to say "fuck you", or stop fishing, since we don't want to kill any fish. To be fair, I am referring to fly fisherpersons here, but the same trends of barbless hooks and catch and release fishing is taking hold in bait and lure fishers as well.
Thanks, I was completely unaware of any of that and it cleared it up nicely. I still don't agree with the standpoint of the people who say you're being cruel unless you kill the fish but I guess they're coming from that utilitarian justification position which I don't buy into but I do understand.
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I don't buy it either. I think what really bugs me about it is that a lot of sportsmen, be it hunters or fishers, feel as though they truly care about the welfare of the animal they pursue. A lot of the critics of hunting and fishing have only a vague idea of what a trout or salmon (or bass or white-tailed deer ect) is, but are more than happy to rail against individuals that choose to spend a lot of their free time around those animals.
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Well, spending time around animals doesn't always mean much. Somebody who works in a battery farm spends more time around chickens than I do and probably has a much greater knowledge of them than me. And then there's stuff like fox hunting with dogs, that really was a nasty practice but again I bet those guys knew more about foxes than me. Greater knowledge and a closer relationship with something is great, but it doesn't always mean you've got the best perspective. Damn, that looks a bit like I'm comparing people that fish to fox hunters, very much not my intention.
I never really got spending a lot of time campaigning about fishing though (as in the pastime, not commercial fishing), I wouldn't do it myself so I steer clear and that's about it. There are much nastier things to get worried about where animal welfare's concerned.
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The part I have difficulty with most is that as soon as they are taken out of the water, they are suffocating. And if you don't throw them back or put them in a bucket soon enough, they die. Fishing when you don't plan on keeping what you catch to eat it is pretty much cruel.
I'm unsure why it's seen as less cruel if you eat them afterwards, a view that seems to have come up a few times in this thread. Genuinely, I don't get the difference, they're both just doing it for fun basically. It's not like anybody needs to be eating fish. What am I missing here?
We were talking about whether or not the fish felt pain. The suffocating issue is how I felt about the fish feeling pain. What I meant was as that if you're going to take a fish out of water, which I believe causes it pain, you'd better have a good reason to do so, which to me means eating it. I don't think fishing in itself is cruel, as I said earlier, I've done it. But the only time we took fish out of the water was to put it immediately in a bucket to move it from one lake to another or to kill it.
And actually, if you are not a vegan/vegetarian, you should eat fish, because it's good for you. And some of them are actually quite delicious.
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The implication (which has since been thrashed to death, but I never got a chance to respond) was that the predators in the wild were somehow choosing to pursue different prey, or at least that's how I read it. It struck me as a pretty bizarre thing to say, so I rebuked it.
Well, I mangled the syntax a bit because I was trying to talk about humans and other animals in the same sentence. However the fact remains that most predators prey on a number of species, and though usually the predators will have one or two prey animals that they prefer to target for whatever biological reason, when one of those prey animals falls below a certain threshold it's not going to be targeted as much. This is not to do with conscious decision-making, but with simple numbers: if in a given area of land there are 100 possums and only 5 rabbits, it's the possums that are going to feel the brunt of the predation simply because they're easier for the predator to catch. After a prolonged period of heavy predation, possum numbers will drop but the rabbit population will have had a chance to build back up to healthy numbers, and the predation pattern will reverse. The point I was trying to make was that humans are the only multi-prey predators that will continue pursuing a species to the point of extinction, no matter how difficult or time-consuming or energy-sapping it becomes to catch that species.
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What can I say, man? Dodo were fucking delicious.