No worries, the thread was reopened today.
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This is a Really Interesting question, if Really Interesting is the adjective I’m looking for.
Because it’s actually two conflated questions:
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one with a fairly self evident answer:
“Is recreational catch and release angling a cruel pastime that unavoidably inflicts unnecessary suffering on other creatures?”
And if anyone somehow doesn’t find the answer to that one immediately obvious - maybe think about how you’d feel watching people “recreationally” holding puppies underwater by a hook through their mouth, to “observe and learn about them”, or just to relax and unwind with a beer out among nature - and how you think that might somehow be different to violently snatching other creatures out of the environment where they are able to breath and properly function, purely for “sport” and trophy photos. Yeah, amazingly enough, you don’t have to be an activist or a scientist to start to figure this one out.
Would it somehow be more ok, or even Beneficial, to do that if we donated a few dollars to a puppy shelter for each puppy we did that to?
If that’s still a bit fuzzy and grey and begging for interjections of “well it depends on …”, another good rule of thumb is to think about what the news headline might be if you got caught doing what you’re doing to random other people that you happened upon…
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and the other question, which makes the conflated pair impossible to answer by anyone other than the person doing the asking, being:
“And am I supposed to care about that?”
But put them both together, and they become a euphemism for a third open question - which is a desperate plea for any rationale that might make caring about the harm you cause be itself unnecessary, because the way you harm them is in fact Scientistically Proven to be very Respectful and Enjoyable. Just like in those ads for wrinkle creams.
I’m not saying don’t release things you caught accidentally that you can’t or aren’t going to eat. The senseless slaughter of millions of tonnes of ‘bycatch’ each year is an ecological disaster. And I’m not saying don’t hunt for things you intend to eat, or that it’s easy to make doing that completely free from suffering.
Does a gazelle killed by a lion suffer? Of course it does.
Does a lion who goes too long without killing something it can eat suffer? Of course it does.
Does the mother of the gazelle killed suffer seeing its child taken? Of course it does.
Can we kill things we want to eat with less suffering than that? Whole other can of worms.
Sometimes destruction and creation go hand in hand as a necessary and normal thing. Most cultures in at least some point of their history have a tradition of giving thanks to the things which lost their lives so others may eat and live. Even predatory fish will often preferentially prey on the weak and injured while doing no harm to other healthy animals around them.
Humans aren’t entirely unique in the habit of killing and harming things Just Because We Can, or because we find it an enjoyable way to spend Idle Time, but it is a trait that puts us on a pretty short list.
Fishing is an interesting case because it sits right at the intersection of the ignorance due to lack of compassion and understanding (“fish are dumb animals that don’t have feelings!”) - and the ignorance born of out of sight out of mind which plagues so many of our waterways now.
I wonder how many recreational fishermen would feel and act the same as they currently do if they really saw and understood their direct impacts on the places they fish. The enormous amount of litter they create through lost tackle, discarded plastic wrapping, bottles, cans, phones, chairs, lost and discarded bait, dead and dying bycatch thrown back. The barren deserts they create in popularly fished places where every last scrap of weed that might feed and shelter fish and other creatures has been torn up out to the distance they are able to cast. Somehow they don’t show you that stuff on the fishing shows sponsored by the tackle makers, or explain why there’s very few fish caught in those places anymore - as long as you keep losing more tackle there and keep replacing it, their work is done.
without recreational fishing, I fear there would be much less funding and certainly less public interest in local fisheries and fish conservation.
Yeah, that’s what they told us about tobacco advertising. Without that funding, civilisation would collapse and there would be No More Sport. And about taxing rich people, and selling alcohol to minors, and all sorts of other things that really had no other justification for how they improved the world except for all the Good Things We Could Do With Bad Money.
If you want to hunt and forage for your own food, and you understand and apply yourself to everything involved in doing that responsibly and sustainably, then good on you - your footprints are probably a whole lot lighter than the people buying soylent green from the factory outlet.
But if you want to put other animals through all the pain of being hunted and trapped, only to throw them back and hope most of them survive the ordeal, for no better reason than “you enjoy it” - then “I do prefer to not think about it” is probably a pretty strong hint as to whether or not it’s a ‘respectful’ thing to be doing to your fellow inhabitants who we all very much need to also keep doing their part in helping to keep this little blue ball a survivable home for all of us …
Just sayin’
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Yeah, let’s just catch and eat the invasives.
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As a recreational fisherman who does care about their impact on nature I do not see fishing having this kind of impact. I am not saying the environmental impact of fishing is zero, lost tackle does happen, but fishing should not involve discarding plastic wrapping, bottles, or cans. If this is causing problems at a fishing spot, the problem is that the fishermen are littering, not that they are fishing (also a lot of the bottles and cans where I fish come from people who use the fishing access as a party spot, not actual anglers). I’m actually really confused what you mean about phones and chairs, I can’t imagine people discard something valuable like their phones at the fishing spot? And I’m not sure why you would leave you chair either? I’ve also never heard of or seen a place where fishing lines tear up all the weeds out to casting distance, my favorite fishing spot is a very busy and weedy area, but the weeds are healthy, is tackle tearing up weeds actually an issue in some places?
I also rarely see dead bycatch, but a problem I do see in some popular fishing spots is numerous fish with damaged mouths and other serious injuries due to poor handling. I personally think barbs on fishhooks are far too large and should always be pinched down for ease of unhooking, and completely barbless hooks are better still, (but do increase chance of fish, mainly pickerel and smallmouth, escaping, or bait coming off the hook)
There is a systemic problem with anglers not knowing how to handle fish properly, and combined with barbed hooks this leads to a huge number of preventable injuries to fish
The main ways I see fish mishandled are the use of rough nets (these damage the fishes slime, a critical part of its immune system, and should not be used for catch and release), using force to remove hooks (easier to avoid this if the hook is not barbed), holding fish by the jaw (a fishes weight should never be held up by its jaw), dangling fish on lines (only a very small fish can actually be suspended from a hook without mouth damage) and careless handling, such as swinging fish or dropping them on rocks. Honestly I would say >95% of people I see fishing for freshwater species other than trout routinely mishandle fish, and this includes most pro fishermen on shows
I really wish more people knew how to handle fish correctly
While on the topic of ways to reduce injury to fish, I would like to also mention two equipment considerations for avoiding injury to fish, the most important one is to prevent the fish from swallowing the hook, with most freshwater species thre are 2 ways to do this, to use artificial lures (no bait or scented soft baits) or, if using bait, to use a circle hook and put the bait below the hook (like this https://www.netknots.com/fishing_knots/knotless-knot) Contrary to popular belief a circle hook does not prevent swallowed hooks if the bait is attached directly to the hook.
The second one is to use small hooks that will only pierce the lip of the fish, and not it’s skull, brain, or eye
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You make a very convincing argument NOT to fish. Thank you.
We have dedicated teams to rescue whales who get trapped by discarded commercial fishing gear. Birds get their legs and feet tangled in discarded snarls from non-commercial fishing. Turtles lose flippers.
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Here in North America a good argument can be made that fishing has done more good than harm to contributing to conservation.
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because that is how you fund conservation? Hunters and fishers fund conservation so they have something to hunt and fish for?
Today a juvenile whale was disentangled.
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Yes, that’s just how conservation works here. If we didn’t have hunters and fisherman on board and paying money toward it, we probably wouldn’t have conservation at all.
My point was that there is a way to handle fish that causes them no injury beyond a puncture to the lip, while acknowledging that most people are not this careful, and pointing out many of the fish handling problems I see in the hope that any new anglers reading this become more aware of the right and wrong way to handle fish, in my experience trout fly anglers are actually quite good at handling fish without harm, and there is no reason bass and panfish anglers cannot be this careful
Hook and line fishing is actually a method used by scientists to catch, tag, and release fish, it does not have to be done in a way that causes serious injury to fish
Proper fish handling isn’t only for catch and release either, those who fish for food should know how to handle the fish that they accidentally catch and are required to put back by law (undersized individual, out of season species, or protected species)
Aren’t the whale entanglements caused by commercial and not recreational gear?
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Yes - I realise that was your intention. But we agree about the injuries.
Commercial fishing entangling our whales. Recreation becomes a bird problem.
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Which is exactly why I made the point that this sort of ignorance is a significant contribution to the problems. And I know for many people it’s not a willful kind of blind eye, because I’ve seen the genuine shock and concern in the faces of anglers I’ve spoken to when they learn about what it really looks like under the water in the space where they are fishing.
And I should be clear, there is very little “catch and release” going on in most of the places here where angling overlaps with diving, other than bycatch, and fish not of a legal size. Aside from “competition fishing”, the vast majority of anglers are hoping to catch something they can eat.
fishing should not involve discarding plastic wrapping, bottles, or cans.
It shouldn’t involve losing tackle and rods and catch buckets and hats and sunglasses and knives and gloves and jewelry and all the other things that people accidentally drop or kick or don’t catch before the wind blows them into the water. And if you don’t ever get in the water to see how much of that stuff people are constantly losing - then, well, I guess we won’t have to listen to people argue about how all of those industries would also go broke if it wasn’t for the enormous good fishermen do constantly replacing what they lose into the ocean.
By far the biggest, and most enduringly damaging, components of the waste piles that accumulate under these people are lost line and tackle, and massive middens of discarded bait shells.
Last year at just one site I even collected four anchors discarded by people fishing from kayaks - two that had been snagged in the fragile habitat of a protected species and cut loose, and two that appeared to have simply been thrown or lost overboard by people who didn’t actually tie them to their boat … But they still wouldn’t have topped the weight of the jags and lures and sinkers and other tackle that cleanup divers removed over the same period.
And that’s before we get into the days when all that ghost tackle had more fish circling and fighting to get off a hook than anyone on the surface was actually landing - or the sharks and fish that would put your average punk to shame with the amount of metal hanging off their faces … or the turtle we cut free from a large lure and ~200m of trailing braided line at 45m last year. etc. etc.
is tackle tearing up weeds actually an issue in some places?
It varies by location - but in many of the places easily and frequently accessed by fishermen, there’s a very clear desert region within which any weed which tries to grow will inevitably be pulled up as a ‘snag’.
I appreciate your genuine concern for wanting to improve best practices for fishing. And so nobody has an excuse to mistake where I’m coming from - I’ll say again that as much as I’m concerned about the terrible and avoidable impacts that result from “recreational fishing” by people who are making mistakes nobody ever warned them about or explained to them - I’m not against people trying to responsibly feed themselves.
It’s what constitutes “responsibly” that needs to evolve to fit the modern world we actually live in. In the Good Old Days when people sustainably fished the water that they lived on, the problem was simple and self regulating. If you screwed up and killed all the fish, there would be nothing left to eat and you and your family would starve. Problem solved.
But now we drive to someone else’s water, do Whatever Is Necessary to try and catch what we want, and if we screw up, we tell sad stories about how that used to be such a great place for fishing but now it isn’t anymore and we need to go somewhere else.
So to me, “catch and release” just for “recreation”, seems like one of those weird things where you tell the kids to eat all their veggies, because it’s wrong to waste food and they won’t get any desert if they do - but then you at the very best, stress and injure, and at the worst kill horribly and slowly, something that you never had any intention of eating, without any real consideration about what other effects that might have on that ecosystem.
Hook and line fishing is actually a method used by scientists to catch, tag, and release fish, it does not have to be done in a way that causes serious injury to fish
Rotenone and deep water trawling are also actually methods used by scientists to catch fish. And drilling holes in their fins to bolt trackers to them and cutting bits off them for genetic analysis is also among the things that are common practice.
If you’re looking to hang that argument on science’s long history of caring about the suffering of the subjects it experiments on … you might want to go back to that thought experiment with the puppies again.
Like how if we didn’t have clear cut logging of old growth forests, there wouldn’t be any trees at all? Or if we didn’t have speeding drivers paying fines there would be no hospitals? Or if we didn’t have lobbyists funding election campaigns there would be no government?
Or how if we didn’t have fact checking, Alternative Truth Statements could claim “good arguments could be made” without offering any sort of proof or actual reasoned argument at all?
https://wildlifeforall.us/myth-busters/who-really-pays-for-wildlife-conservation/
https://www.huntingecologist.com/who_pays.html
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These articles greatly understate the impact that state conservation agencies have on conservation here in the US. Sure, things like Pittmann-Robsertson aren’t the whole picture, but they truly are a massive part of it. And, without these sorts of things fostering positive attitudes among the public, conservation in this country would be on a much lower level than we see and largely unrecognizable.
The places I fish you can see under the water and see the weeds, what kinds of settings are you encountering missing weeds out to casting distance?
No it shouldn’t, and fisherman hate to lose this stuff, I am surprised that people are losing so many possessions into the water, where I fish you can see the bottom and you don’t see people’s possessions. I also don’t think the fact that sometimes people drop their stuff in the water is a good argument against fishing, this seems like an argument against any human activity near water
Sometimes getting a hook/sinker/lure snagged on the bottom is not avoidable, but in what I have seen this is a very small portion of the trash at popular fishing holes, most of it is just people littering
I said this in response to the claim that catch and release is killing the fish, the point I was trying to make is that fish are living after release otherwise the scientists would not get useful data, I made no claim that science has a long history of caring about animal suffering.
As far as I know rotenone is not used to learn about fish but to remove invasives, the point is to cause disruption to the environment, not just to study it, so I don’t think that is comparable. And I have never heard of deep trawling being used in modern times for research
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And some of us non-anglers do see these things. Back in August, as part of Greenville’s summer-long series of Pride events, a local LGBT-owned kayaking oufitter hosted the Pride Paddle. Before launching, we did see a bluegill in distress, floating sideways near the river surface. The first participant to launch promptly went over to cut down and remove a tangled fishing line that was dangling its hook in the water – although they couldn’t get the part in the tree overhead. On the return paddle, several of us collected floating litter in our kayaks to bring to shore for proper disposal.
Dead and dying bycatch, lost tackle, discarded plastic trash – that’s all three in one outing.
And it’s qustionable how much of that Bad Money actually went into doing those Good Things anyway.
Do you carry out other people’s litter when you find it?
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Where I live, catch-and-release may be banned for some species in the next few years because scientists “with credentials” view even a <10% mortality rate as too high.
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What species? and what country?
Small hazardous litter I remove, like lead sinkers, line spools, hooks, ect, and I will also try to pick up old lure wrappers and other things I can easily carry out with my gear. But if cleaned up all the litter I saw in the outdoors (not specifically fishing spots) I would not have much time for any outdoor activities other than picking up litter
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I do catch and release. And yes, I am aware it can impact the fish I release. On the flip side I can remove invasive fish species from the environment
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I imagine you would be able to tell that the bottom is sandy with intermittent weeds, but with continuous weeds closer to shore. You would not see the continuous weeds to the side or offshore of the pier while standing on it
I do know for a fact that the pier I fish is not stripped like this, since there are unbroken weeds right up to the pier
This is really interesting though that the pier has actually changed the habitat for at least dozens of meters around, I am quite familiar with catching seaweed, but would never have imagined the seaweed would get ‘fished out’
I’m not sure how I would estimate this, I have no idea how much tackle people lose there or how many fish people catch there
I would not see it unless we are talking about a really large sinker, but my hook would catch the line when I was reeling in, and I would pull up the line, wrap it in a ball, and stuff it in my tacklebox to dispose of
I can see my tackle and the fish around it at 1/3 to 1/2 of full casting distance, I think my comment about being able to see the bottom refered to being able to tell that the weeds close to the pier are intact and there is not a lot of trash dropped off the pier, I never claimed to be able to see the bottom far out
Ah, I misunderstood you, I fully agree that people should be more aware of the effect they have on the environment and not litter.
I’ve not heard of stage one grief, google is telling me this is denial. I don’t think I’m in denial so much as I am saying I have evidence that the problems you describe are not happening at the fishing spots I know, and I’m curious about what you are seeing at the fishing spots you know that is so different. I’m not going to deny anything there is evidence for.
Wow, and they want to use it on reefs?? Just the abstract is using appeal to tradition and naturalistic fallacies to make rotenone sound safe, I mean, radium is natural too, but I wouldn’t put it on a reef…
I thought benthic trawling was considered one of the most damaging commercial fishing methods, I’m surprised this is still used for reaserch
You are right, this really just tells us they don’t all die
Do you encounter fish with hooks permanently stuck in them? The only times I have caught fish with hooks stuck in them were swallowed hooks, which are preventable by action on the fisherman’s end. I thought studies had shown that fish that break the line usually lose the hook.
I’ve hidden a few posts here that contained language that were more ad hominem than necessary. Again, this is about understanding each other’s points of view, even if there are strong disagreements.
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