Fishing With Face

That picture of the mounted fish reminded me of how beautiful fish are. A parishioner took me out fishing a few Saturdays ago and we just walked the river using mealworms and catching mostly little guys. Everyone was so beautiful! Their colors and their strength, it was cool until I started wondering again if I was hurting these fish too much by sticking this barbed hook in their lip. Darn my conscience. I know one time before you soothed my conscience about fishing Face, maybe you could do that again.

Quote: FrGamble

That picture of the mounted fish reminded me of how beautiful fish are. A parishioner took me out fishing a few Saturdays ago and we just walked the river using mealworms and catching mostly little guys. Everyone was so beautiful! Their colors and their strength, it was cool until I started wondering again if I was hurting these fish too much by sticking this barbed hook in their lip. Darn my conscience. I know one time before you soothed my conscience about fishing Face, maybe you could do that again.

Jesus encouraged his disciples to fish. He filled nets to overflowing, and even cooked them with his own hands. Don't sweat it, you are in good company.

They really are. Pumpkinseed are my favorite, and I think they're prettier than just about any of the tropical specimens I've seen available. They're almost cartoonish. The greens too deep, the oranges too orange. And the stripes are iridescent. From one angle they'll look silver, from another, an electric blue, and it sort of runs and wavers in and out as they move.



On pain, first, crimp your barbs down. Just take any old pair of pliers and squeeze the barb to the shaft. Yeah, you might lose 1 or 2 extra fish per trip. But if you're using proper technique, keeping the line tight, and the rod tip up, you won't even lose those. It makes removing the fish so much easier, and those times you get one deep where man-hands have trouble reaching can just be jiggled out. While I'm not convinced fish feel pain (more later), I know fish are often damaged by handling. If you really have to crank on a hook because it embedded in the jaw bone or the cheek, you can separate their jaws or cause other structural damage. It's rare that you hook one that gets stuck to that level, but when you do, it's such a bitch to deal with. Just crimp your barbs and be done with it. Unless you're fishing to harvest or for big money, they're unnecessary.

On pain, there just isn't anything definitive. But I can tell you two things with absolute confidence - 1) They feel something, 2) It's not as we do.

Besides my readings, I know they feel something because I witnessed it first hand. My fish are absolutely adverse to bees, even if that's all I've had to feed them for weeks. On a normal feeding day, they won't even touch them. If that's all I can get, they'll eventually do it, but completely different from typical feeding. I throw any other thing in there and they hammer and swallow it immediately. Grasshoppers, worms, maggots, minnows, even crays with the armored pincers. They don't hesitate. With bees, they always ALWAYS pause. They'll come out from the weeds at 100mph and stop dead at it. If they do take it, they chomp it and spit it, chomp it and spit it. I assume they're trying to kill it before it can sting them. After 5 - 10 of these chomps, they'll finally eat it. And that goes for all the fish who eat this type of food. Pumpkinseed, bluegill, my smaller largemouth and smallmouth, they all do it.

The research confirms that. They inject fish with bee venom, inject them with saline, inject them with acids, inject them with irritants followed by anesthetic. They react as you expect if they could sense "pain". The saline and the anesthetized ones act normal. The irritated ones act irritated. And as evidenced by my bee feeding, they do feel and remember. Why do you think fishermen have more than one lure? Because they'll remember that white grub with the wiggly tail got them yanked from the water lol. They'll remember for that week, anyways =p

But whatever they feel, they don't feel the way we do, or any mammals do. The have no neocortex, their entire biology is different. I've shared how I've caught trout completely stripped of fins, jaws and tails worn and scarred from breeding. Touching these areas causes no response from the fish, unlike we would if I pressed a finger into your brush burn. Ditto for lamprey wounds, or peeling leeches off them. Even when in a sensitive area like around the gills, prying a swollen leech off them causes no reaction that I can perceive. No tensing, no flopping, nothing. Same goes for many of my hook removals. Especially when I use jointed Rapalas, popping the hook out of the mouth often results in me poking or even hooking its face with the other one. No reaction. All of my tank fish (except my newly acquired tropical setup) are and have been all hook caught. There is occasional bruising, especially with the small fish. And the larger ones often sport a flap of skin where the hook was, like a chapped lip. If it bothers them, there is absolutely no sign of it. "Wounded mouth" or no, he had no problem eating every cray I tossed in there immediately. He didn't nurse it, wasn't hesitant, there is just no sign whatsoever that he had a wound or pulled muscles or anything like that. And whether it's a little flap of lip skin or I split a fin from flesh to tip, it completely heals in about 10 days.

My opinion is that if you wanted to be offended, you can certainly find reason to be. Even if you used magic to send down a fluffy, watery cloud to trap them and bring them to you, you're still removing them from their habitat, you're still stressing them out. If you want to follow the PETA path, that's your decision. My beliefs are that you can't do anything without affecting something else. The amount of biomass you destroy from gardening or even just commuting from home to church pales in comparison to any damage you do fishing. You've already destroyed literal pounds of insects, many of which are probably still simmering in your radiator. No one is perfect. So, too, are their actions imperfect.

I know my passion has this negative effect. I also know that the same action has the benefit of funneling money to those who protect it. The money I spend on this activity goes to enact and enforce laws to establish creel limits, ensuring the fish are not killed to extinction. It funds clean up efforts of garbage and industrial waste. It funds hatcheries which bring to life millions of fish that would otherwise not exist. It protects waterways from pollution and desecration. It establishes education to teach people ways to properly handle fish to protect them that they would have otherwise been ignorant about. It encourages stewardship; I sure don't walk out of the crick with pockets full of crushed beer cans and old fishing line for my health. It's the result of education I got from programs funded by the passion I pursue. None of this, none of it, would be possible without the men and women who engage in this lifestyle.

And all that is just the direct benefit. Look at me and my kid. It was the same with me and Pops. Where are the family values nowadays? Where is the cohesion, the unity? Even the "good stuff" like sports ain't so good anymore. Mom and dad rush home from work, yell at the kid to get ready, smash everything into the car, and haul ass to the field. You dump him out of the car, jam him to the field, and then try to get all the activity and dedication and discipline squashed in an hour. An hour of 100 people cheering and clapping, a bunch of kids of various skill and social / cultural backgrounds running amok, and try to get in at least one lesson amidst the chaos. The whistle blows and you stuff him in the car to rush home, throw him in front of homework while you do dinner, distractedly answering his questions. Stuff his face, throw him in the tub, throw him in bed. Where's the "good"?

I ain't perfect. I fucked up a lot of things and will fuck up plenty more before my time is up. But when he and I are in the woods and on the water, that's all there is. There is no schedule, no hectic pace, no set goal we must hit or face the risk of failure. It's him, I, and a little patch of water right in front of us. Nothing else exists. He watches me and learns real knowledge. I watch him and I do the same. We share the excitement, share the let downs, share the victory, share the defeat. It's one of the few times I feel "at one". It might be the only time I think "This is right", like I'm parenting the way it's supposed to be. People talk of "watching their kid blossom" when he first eats or first walks or first talks. Bullshit. 20 billion people before him walked and talked and ate. I see real change in him when we leave the water. A pep in his step and a twinkle in his eye that wasn't there when we started. I see living. Not the hustle and bustle hectic bullshit people call "life" nowadays, but real living. The way it's meant to be.

All that for poking a hole in a fish that'll heal in ten days. I sleep just fine =)

Quote: Face

All that for poking a hole in a fish that'll heal in ten days. I sleep just fine =)

There are women who can butcher animals, even animals that they have raised. There are teenaged girls who hesitate at taking a fish out of water. Even as a guide to some nature event, there can be girls who hesitate to pull gills out or something. As to pain sensation and memory, I've no idea how "high" we rate various creatures, but when an octopus puts its prey to sleep it does it by wafting insulin into the water. I think the Declaration of Independence was written with cuttlefish ink. Respect? For eons sailors have eaten fish. Worms, hooks and fish... it used to be a lifestyle for most of this nation growing up. Now the lifestyle is more oriented to Fish, Vampires and Space Aliens Version 4.

Face you are awesome! I can't wait to go fishing again!

Add this to your guilt complex

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2004/040326.htm

Corn, maple trees, just about everything in nature seems to female: communicating ALL the time.

edited

edited

edited