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[jhocking]

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.

[PacoSees]

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.

[a pack of wolves]

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?

[calenlass]

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.

[jhocking]

EDIT: Has anyone ever provided a good explanation for why this forum doesn't have a delete function?

[Liz]

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.

[Boro_Bandito]

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.

[Gemmwah]

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.

[Boro_Bandito]

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.

[Orbert]

Good point Orbert, altough you happen to be conveniently forgetting the entirety of the Lotka-Volterra model/equations, 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.

[SonofZ3]

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.

[Boro_Bandito]

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.

[a pack of wolves]

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.

[SonofZ3]

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.

[a pack of wolves]

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.

[Lines]

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.

[Inlander]

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.

[thepugs]

What can I say, man?  Dodo were fucking delicious.