As I’ve said elsewhere on the site I read the Shooting Times.
It covers a lot of topics other than Shooting which includes, amongst other things, Fishing.
As a publication it tries to present both sides of the argument on contentious issues one of which, in the case of fishing, is Catch & Release: that is rather than killing a fish you’ve caught you release it alive.
This, of course, is the norm in Coarse fishing (despite fish such as Carp and Pike being good eating and regarded as such in other countries), but is a relatively recent phenomena in the UK Game fishing (another import from the PC religious Americans).
I personally have no time for it.
Rightly or wrongly I can justify to myself putting a fish through what must be an unpleasant experience if the objective is to kill it, cook it and eat it (I’m clearly not a Vegetarian).
To me the same logic applies as in people shooting pheasants and not eating them: if you want to demonstrate your shooting prowess but are not interested in eating what you’ve killed (and inevitably in some cases just wounded) stick to clays.
Anyway back to the Shooting Times. It runs an article on people arguing the case on both sides of a topic. Regarding Catch & Release for me the salient points were:
Against
- Since Catch & Release has become more prevalent Fish stocks have not improved, so probably something else is causing the decline;
- The fish you release are often so exhausted (especially big ones) that they die anyway or are easy prey for predators;
- Fish are not playthings for Humans
For
- ‘By catching a Fish am I using them as an instrument of my own pleasure? This is a philosophical question I’m happy to side step’….!
- ‘I have just returned from two wonderful days ..fishing for brown trout.. the choice on the menu was freeze-dried boil-in-the-bag pasta or fresh Trout. Needless to say the Trout won and the frying pan sizzled’
Clearly Trout are not under the pressure that say Salmon are but that being the case just leave the Salmon in peace and simply watch them.
For me the For response is hypocritical, whereas the Against response recognises that Catch & Release is probably not addressing the root cause of any reduction in fish stocks and may be deflecting efforts to understand what that root cause is, and most importantly ‘Fish are not playthings’ – even if they can be food.
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