Here is a new post on a topic dear to my heart. The original essay has been published in outdoor magazines but the editors always want it to be shorter. I decided not to rewrite the whole thing because I am a pretty slow typist. I do want to include a few observations about killing animals and witnessing their death, an experience not widely shared. It is a moving event to witness. A mortally wounded animal struggles to resist it’s death with every fiber of it’s being. You can see the look of panic and wild confusion in it’s eyes and the intensity with which it flails about in agony is distressing to see. This is why every hunter, or at least every ethical hunter, hones their skills so that they are able to kill their quarry with the first shot to minimize the suffering of the game they hunt. We usually hunt mammals. Creatures a lot like us even though they have four legs. So we can anthropomorphize them and empathize with their fate and suffering. This leads us to care deeply about matters such as “fair chase” and ethical hunting practices. I don’t pretend that this makes the dramatic and intense experience of taking the life of an animal easy. It never is. Because fish are sort of like an alien species most people who fish fail to extend the same ethical practices to the hunting and killing of them. They are a different family (not mammals) of creatures to which we do not relate as we do to the big- eyed white tail mother of Bambi or Yogi Bear and all the other mammals we have learned to love dearly thanks to Disney. So this essay is about the ethics of how we fish (in this case trout) and hunt with an emphasis on how these behaviors can illustrate some truths about how we ourselves live and die. One other bit of content that was edited out of the version I am posting: imagine you have just run a quarter-mile sprint with a large hook in the corner of your mouth or maybe your eye, a hook that is pulling you back as you run but you still run for your life because you are in fear of death. Your heart is racing, you are struggling for oxygen, your levels of cortisol and lactate are dangerously elevated. Suddenly you are seized by some other-worldly force, lifted up, plunged under the water and held there for a minimum of thirty seconds, the time required to take a quick trophy shot of a trout. Not to worry, the hook was barbless, you’re suddenly back on the track again, free to continue running against the current.
Since my limited skills would have required an enormous investment of time to revise the essay to add the content I have had to delete for editorial limitations imposed by publishers I left the essay as is. Let me know what you think.
LIFE, DEATH AND CATCH AND RELEASE
Let me assure the wary and seasoned fisher that I do not intend to insult anyone’s intelligence by presuming to add my secret release techniques to those which can be found on most of the nearly fifty-seven thousand web sites now available. Nor do I intend to lament the fate of the fish with missing eyes and deformed, missing or inverted maxillaries, scarred from being caught and released repeatedly on the South Platte in Colorado, the Big Hole and upper Madison in Montana and even the Alagnack River in Alaska. What I humbly intend to share here with my fellow outdoor enthusiasts is the wisdom I have passed on to several generations of young men and women I have taught to fish, including my own children.
Hunting and fishing have always been activities of predators. Our genetic history can be traced far back to those first hominid carnivores who crossed continents in search of game animals they came to regard as kin and sacred totems. Hunting and fishing constitute the pattern of behavior of predation which is accompanied by a heightened state of awareness caused by the release of neurotransmitters by the autonomic nervous system passed down to us by the genes of our hunter forebearers. This same state of awareness animates both predator and prey. Although we are technically Omnivores, I doubt that our forebearers became intensely excited about finding wild asparagus or had an adrenaline rush upon encountering a nice patch of mushrooms. If you hunt and fish, no matter how elegant your gear or how poetic the language you use to describe the experience, you are engaging in a behavior of “Homo-Praedator.”
My old, dog-eared Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology defines a predator as a “plunderer” of booty and the adjective predatory as being “addicted to plundering.” The word prey is defined as “that which is taken by violence; animal hunted or killed.” I have known many violators who plundered prey like Pauly Fredricks and his father, Big Paul, who stacked walleye fillets in their freezer like cordwood or the Whittakers who used to fill gunnysacks with geese they massacred on the Rainbow Flowage Wildlife Refuge on cloudy days when the spotter planes of the DNR couldn’t fly.
I must confess to having been addicted to this same ferocious rush of plundering prey fifty yeas ago when I was a boy in Northern Wisconsin. I used to hunt monster muskies in vast weed beds with hardwood crank baits, bucktails and big sucker minnows. I used to sell them to Fuzzy Maleck and Curly Drewson, the owners of the two local bars where musky guides and tourist fishermen congregated after a day of musky hunting. They were sold “under the counter” to unsuccessful clients so they could have trophies to hang in their dens in the Chicago suburbs.
The worst case of plundering I know of was a fellow arrested in Anchorage, Alaska a few years ago who had snagged forty “reds” and shot thirty or forty more with a pistol. He was on the way back home with his pick-up full of salmon when he was arrested. His only defense was, “I couldn’t help myself.” The second worst case of frenzied fish-killing I know of happened in May several years ago at Canyon Ferry in Montana. I noted the date in my fishing journal. I was near the mouth of Confederate Creek casting streamers for big rainbows staging for their spawning run. I watched a warden arrest a group of boys who were wading up the creek, wildly whacking rainbows with baseball bats and stuffing the dead fish in gunny sacks.
This outrageous behavior is an unconstrained, exaggerated form of the same pleasurable rush of emotion that motivates every seeker of prey. This pleasure derives from the arousal of the sympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system resulting in an intense state of alertness, increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, and increased blood flow to the muscles. Hunting, sex, flight, and fear all engage the autonomic nervous system and threaten to put us on auto-pilot unless we impose some rational control. It is a definite high which can become addictive. If left unchecked and combined with the arrogance of men of little substance and narrow experience, it can result in the abuse of all the fish and game in creation.
I have fished with two species of anglers. The first is comprised of the anthropoid ape bait fishermen who are very up-front about the rush they experience in the encounter with their prey. For them, the adrenaline released by the sympathic nervous system is as addictive as crack cocaine. The other species, the fly fishers, represent the true, modern hominids who are more highly evolved because they have acquired more finely developed linguistic skills and have fashioned a system of communication about fishing so complex that it raises to utter perfection the notion of fishing as a metaphor for the metaphysical. The highly-evolved fisher presents the enterprise in a philosophic context where fishing becomes an altruistic endeavor of man imitating nature and beholding the universe itself in “every refractive glide of water” as Tom McGuane has written somewhere. No one in this class of fishers would admit to any motivation related to baser instincts. However, when they feel the electric jolt of a trophy fish surge through their wrist, they are as transported by the experience as a drug addict. This is not a casual comparison. A colleague of mine, a neuroscientist who vetted this essay, assures me that cocaine and adrenaline stimulate the same neurotransmitters.
Both the bait fisher and the fly-fisher talk of “fighting” the fish and coincide in their concern about size. Have a conversation with the young guides wearing the fly shop logo cap, the “quick-dry” pants and light-weight, high-tech fisher shirts and you will discover they are just as addicted to the excitement of the hunt as the Alaskan who filled his pick-up with salmon. They talk casually of catching “thirty” and “forty” fish as if the whole point is to prove one’s prowess in terms of numbers and size. The standard graphic in brochures depicts a grinning fisher holding a trophy fish by the tail with the other hand gently cradling its belly poised to release it to the pristine environment from which it came. Were the camera to zoom in for a close-up we might be able to see the deformities caused by previous catches and releases, but this is never the case. Closer scrutiny might reveal that this exploitation of another species for ego, fun and profit is not an innocent enterprise.
When it comes to the recounting of the moment of truth in the hunt for fish, all fishers speak with the same animation as the old violators I remember. Regardless of which species of “homo-praedator” one might be, the successful act of predation is accompanied by the same visceral sense of energy we have inherited genetically from our forbearer hunter-gatherers. The only difference between a fish wounded by a hook or an animal wounded by an errant arrow or bullet is that the former is released by the hunter and the latter is left to escape on its own. The fishing industry goes to great lengths to prove that fish do not feel the pain felt by the mammals we hunt but they are both injured by our acts of predation. In both cases the prey brings to bear all of its physiological resources upon the goal of escaping. The levels of plasma cortisol and lactate become dangerously elevated in fish as they do in humans under severe physical stress. It is a dramatic death struggle with potentially fatal consequences even after the trophy is released to the pristine waters of the brochure.
In fishing, there is no ritual recognition of the parallels between the human and animal world which are enacted in the hunt. The congratulatory behavior of high-fives, the posing and picture-taking sessions take precedence over the actual release of the fish. It is released carefully so it may be caught again. But this is not ritual behavior. Ritual is instrumental behavior which renews and strengthens our beliefs in the order of the natural world. For me it is important to remember that the remarkable behavior we engage in when we hunt in wild places prefigures our own sense of where we fit in the natural order of the universe. When releasing a fish I recommend that fishers feel in the pulse of the fish their own. The myths of preliterate peoples reflect the oneness of the fate of man and animal. I recommend we do the same and release fish with a ritual sense of reverence recognizing that we too shall become deceived by the clever artifices of the world and struggle to regain our lives.
This is the contextual framework in which I hunt and fish and practice the techniques of catch-and-release. It is also the perspective which shapes the advice I give to young people who would become fishers. Fishing is a way of seeking to bring ourselves into harmony with the nature of our universe and it begins with recognizing our role in the drama of predator and prey. Take one good fish from each stretch of water recognizing the predatory impulse motivating your behavior. Come to grips with the essence of the hunt and learn how to quickly and mercifully kill the fish you have stalked. Understand the physiology of your quarry and acquire the skill to make the precise strokes of the knife required to release flesh from bone. Learn how to care for the flesh in the field and how to prepare the meat for the ritual act of consumption. Claude Levi-Strauss has observed in The Raw and the Cooked that in the native mythologies of the New World culinary operations are mediatory rituals between life and death as well as between nature and society. It is this act of consumption which binds you with the drama of life and death implicit in your act of predation. Hunting and fishing take place in a natural environment governed by dynamic and complex forces which are constant and more enduring than the brief span of our passing.
I have no patience with so-called fishers who would not deign to consume an occasional fish. In refusing to do so they deny the very nature of their act and convert the life and death struggle of their prey into mere sport for their shallow pleasure. Do not abuse your quarry by becoming so addicted to the physical thrill of the hunt or so driven by your natural inclination toward hubris that you boast of the forty you deigned to release. Remember that all forty have been wounded and struggled to be free as you will one day. Remember too that some will die from the trauma in spite of having been posed for trophy photos. If you truly grasp the meaning of your stratagems for stalking fish, you will admit to the hunter in you and grant a deserved dignity to your prey rather than treat it as a meretricious trophy for your pleasure and profit. This is not behavior worthy of any species in the long and complex chain of predation. Thus I end my advice and submit the wisdom of these reflections to the judgment of the fair-minded readers who wander rivers in search of the meaning of their lives.
