Should we always put them back?
I’m quite
sure that I have mentioned before my annoyance when I hear people who do not fish
ask anglers if they “throw the fish back”.
Of course no intelligent person ever throws a fish anywhere. We pride ourselves
as anglers that we take great care of the fish that we release back into the water
after we have caught them.
We avoid touching the fish with dry hands and we mainly use barbless hooks, and
perhaps most important of all we support the anti-pollution bodies because polluting
the water is the cruellest thing that you can subject fish to.
Nearly every day I get junk mail which often includes requests for donations to
charities.
One such request was from the RSPCA.
However, I have not yet sent any donation to the RSPCA and I will tell you why
this is.
About 40 years ago several fishing tackle shops where I bought bait and tackle
had collecting boxes on the counter for customers to donate to the RSPCA.
Then a representative of the RSPCA started criticising anglers as being cruel.
When I took the matter up with the organisation I was told they were not at all
happy about angling which they considered (quite wrongly in my view) to be cruel.
After I quoted this in my column in the Derbyshire Times – which I have
written for half-a-century now – the collecting tins were withdrawn from
the tackle shop counters.
I cannot, however, go along with taunts about anglers being cruel. I have written
to the RSPCA requesting up to date attitudes to the cruelty question with regards
to anglers and I hope to publish any reply I receive in the near future.
However, I am very much aware that many of my fellow anglers react with horror
to any suggestion that we should kill a coarse fish from freshwater and take it
home to eat.
There are a few occasions when eating a coarse fish is, I feel, justified.
Eels are the most nutritious of all fish and until eels declined in numbers in
our rivers in recent years I enjoyed eating them myself. Similarly, when camping
I enjoyed catching and eating perch, finding them absolutely delicious.