A guy catches the fish of a lifetime and kills it, and the fly fishing community is up in arms. The non-fishing population, and even many anglers who don’t fly, don’t get it. Isn’t the point of fishing to catch something to eat? I showed the picture to a friend and got that exact response.
To many outside the fishing community, catch and release seems akin to torture. Or, as some who have made the hunting analogy say, nonsensical–like wrestling a deer to the ground, dunking its head under water for a quick photo op, and letting it go. (I’d credit the originator if I could remember where I read that one.)
That analogy sort of works because, for all the mystical bullshit about becoming one with the fish or bonding with nature, fishing is hunting, without the kill shot.
We release fish because we can.
Watch a well-fed house cat stalk a field mouse. It doesn’t need to but it has to, as millions of years of predatory evolution snap off the proper synapses in its brain, and it crouches into deep focus and adrenaline management, waiting for just the right moment to release endorphins in mid pounce.
We’re born to that, too. You can trick yourself into thinking we’ll evolve to a higher level by going herbivore.You can trick yourself into thinking Dane Cook is really talented. It doesn’t make it so.
The hunt is what it’s all about, the stalking and pursuit of quarry by means of a long stick and hand-tied duplicity until the object of our desire is fooled, fought, and subdued. We get off on the endorphin release and then we get to make a choice. We can let the fish go and let it breed so we can do it again. We may be stupid, but we’re smart enough to know that if we kill everything we may never get to do it again and nobody else will either. So we let them go and we fiercely fight to protect where they live so we can keep doing it.
If this is all peculiar to you, so be it.
Pete McDonald
If you cared so much if a fish lived or died you wouldn’t cast to it in the first place. You don’t give a flying fuck until after you had your way with it and then you put it back saying I hope it lives so I don’t feel like a complete asshole.
Please scroll up far enough to read my last sentence.
Dane Cook SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS!
If I may respond to Hypocrite…I couldn’t agree with you more. (One of?) our primary motivation(s) to see fish live is the potential of catching them. However, this drives us to be among the most ardent conservationists you will find. I know the fish would be better off if I never caught it in the first place…but I don’t give a rats ass. Every conservationist (or animal-rights ethicist), whether they realize it or not, acts out of self-interest. Who is the real hypocrite here?
Thanks for the perspective Pete; all the fish-killer bashing, and coverage thereof, was becoming exhausting.
Thanks Ed. Well put about fish and not funny people.
I suspect there are a few folks that feel like crawling under a rock over this, and a few more who probably should offer apologies. I doubt the latter will happen – the unbridled arrogance and rush to judgment was telling enough.
Still, I’ll hold my breath, as the elitism is putrid.
I actually don’t think the guy should have killed the fish but am not going to fry him for it if he says it was bleeding from the gills; as you point out in your post MG I have no recourse but to take him at his word. I’d also say that I hope the picture of him holding up the fish by its gill plates came after the decision to kill it, not before.
I sometimes eat fish I catch but release almost all of them. But there is no moral high ground in release; like I said we do it because we can and because it makes sense from a sustainability standpoint, and we should do it for that reason.
As I’ve made the argument in a comment spar-fest with spearfishermen about tarpon last year, some species can support a regulated harvest, and some can’t. And as many pointed out to me in that argument, if it’s legal people will do it. If wild steelhead need no-kill protection, make it happen.
People like youareallhypocrites kind of get under my skin. If it weren’t for fisherman a lot of watersheds would be in a lot worse shape then they are now. It’s the fisherman who are fighting to keep the waters cleaner and the fish populations up. People like that are the reason Switzerland is banning catch and release fishing. How anyone in their right mind can think that will somehow benefit the fish is beyond me.
Here is something you can’t understand…
The majority of the people that say fishing is “cruel and harmful” to the fish need to shut their ignorant mouths. These are the same people that will be asking the outdoorsmen and women to help them if ever stranded in BFE, because they won’t know how to survive. IMO, they are a bunch of tree hugging, granola eating, metrosexual pansies. As for the guy who kept the fish, if it was bleeding from the gills it was probably going to die anyway. If it wasn’t bleeding, he is still allowed to keep it under regulations. Either way, he has done more through the taxation of his fishing equipment and liscenses to protect the environment than any of these anti-fishing/hunting goons.
Chris, Jon, anglers see both fish and our relationshipto them and to the natural world on a real, firsthand basis, where many of those opposed are dealing in the abstract.
M.E.,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d12EI3xNiqE
We are not just fishing to eat.
Sure there are some fishermen who are really just meat fishermen, but that is not the same thing as a sportsman.
Primal! Well said Pete.
It’s never easy being primal from the 42nd floor
well said Pete. It makes me sick that true, so called hard core fisherman are crucifying this poor guy. You may not buy his story or agree with his decision, but what law natural or unnatural did he violate? Did anyone with the online lynch mob crowd stop and think to ask the guy how many steelhead he has released in his life?
[...] beginning to notice a pattern: skilled anglers who just so happen to grasp the notion that fly fishing is a sport grounded in “the hunt” are putting up trophies, while a pack of panda-food-slinging, latte-sipping nancy boys jump to [...]
Pete – the 42nd floor is all the more reason we need the hunt on the weekends.
Weekdays…
I have a couple of friends that think I am just plain nuts for practicing catch and release. They want to go fishing with me but won’t because I let my catches go.
But I am okay with that, let them stay home as more fish will live to fight me another day.
WOW that first comment really sucked! People think to much. Almost everyone has a passion for something, right? So what would this world be like if everyone bashed someone’s way of life. How would Hippie Hypocrite like it if someone got pissed because tofu is cruel to soy beans? Don’t take yourselves to serious folks because in the end Mother Earth will shake us ALL off like a bunch of ticks!