Y Fish?

I have devised a new sport. I’m planning on taking the family down to Garema Place in Civic one lunchtime where there are plenty of magpies hanging around the café tables looking for scraps.

We’ll bait some hooks with raw meat and cast them to the birds. Once we coax one to swallow the bait and get the hook embedded in its mouth or throat we’ll start to haul it in. It’ll probably try to fly off so we’ll get some great sport as it fights to get away.

If it’s still alive by the time we reel it in we might let it go – catch and release is the go these days. It might even recover after its painful, stressful experience. But if it’s big enough to eat we’ll just drop it into a plastic box and tightly seal the lid so that the animal can slowly die from lack of oxygen.

Sounds disgusting doesn’t it? No one would allow it. So why the hell do we allow – even promote – the identical thing to be done to other small animals, i.e. fish?
Scientific evidence shows that fish feel stress and pain in the same way as other animals such as birds (see Science below).

It may not be absolutely proved that angling hurts fish (and the angling groups are pushing that line) but the mere fact that they may should be enough to stop the so-called sport now. The onus of proof is definitely on the anglers to prove that what they do cannot hurt the fish – or the live bait they use for that matter.

We should never confuse an animal’s inability to express its pain and suffering with its capacity to suffer. Just because fish have no voice and do not have facial expressions we can’t assume that they are not suffering.

I suspect that if these animals could scream or had legs that enabled them to run back to the water it would change the attitudes of at least some fisher-folk. I can’t imagine a lot of anglers chasing after a screaming fish as it ran back to the water.

Science
Dr Lynne Sneddon at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, Scotland said “To demonstrate pain perception it was necessary to prove that the fish’s behaviour was adversely affected by a potentially painful experience and that the behavioural change was not a simple reflex response. Our research conclusively demonstrated evidence of pain perception”. - Fish do feel pain scientists say http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2983045.stm

Similarly, Dr Victoria Braithwaite, of Edinburgh University’s school of biological sciences says “The evidence I have presented suggests that fish do have the capacity to experience pain and fear” - Fish Pain Perception http://www.aquanet.ca/English/research/fish/vb.pdf

For more, see FishingHurts.com