Ethics Of Fishing

Day 225: One of my readers has asked me to address the ethics of fishing, i.e., to justify inflicting pain on a fish I do not intend to kill and eat. This is a very complex issue, and since I caught and released six trout at Rapjohn Lake today, this is a good time to address it.

First let me say that you will find me in the forefront when it comes to acknowledging both sentience and self-awareness in many species of animals and birds. However, very few members of the scientific community will credit fish with either. A fish is a sleek, scaly packet of instinctive and conditioned responses, nothing more.

Here we must explore the difference between cognition and conditioning. Cognition is an active thought process, whether verbal or nonverbal: "I chased and chomped down on a green thing which was swimming in a straight line and something pointed pierced my mouth and I couldn't get loose" versus "> > > > > - *!* - !!!" (for lack of a better way to express it). The cognitive being makes direct associations through perception (action and result) whereas a conditioned response simply results in avoidance in the same scenario.

So does a fish feel pain? Yes, but the way its brain processes the pain stimulus is less sophisticated than the way a dog's or dolphin's brain processes it, and therefore it is "felt" as an element of conditioning, rather than a cognitive response. I know, that's a hard distinction to make, but it's crucial to this explanation.

The waters I've been fishing lately have all been "put-and-take" fisheries, which is to say that the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife rears trout in hatcheries and uses them to stock lakes and rivers for the pleasure of anglers (and for the dollars they spend on fishing licenses). These fish lack any of the native fish's wariness with respect to predators of any sort, and are therefore doomed from the get-go. They've been fed hatchery food until they're fat and sassy, and then after they've had their food withheld until they've gotten good and hungry, they're turned loose in the lakes where fishermen are already lined up waiting for the truck to drop them off. They don't stand a chance against the hundreds of hooks baited with PowerBait, and many will be dead within a week. A month past Opening Day, most of the lakes will be "fished out," which is to say the only fish remaining will be the few which were able to avoid being taken, perhaps because they were conditioned by a few narrow escapes...like being hooked by a catch-and-release fisherman who let them go smarter, if with a sore mouth.