On Fishing

But even with proper release techniques, slot limits, circle hooks, and descending devices, we will still need to change our behavior by limiting what the commercial fishing sector calls “fishing effort.” In fishing, like in life, there are good days and there are bad days. And because of the increasing number of bad days in the present era, fishermen tend to keep on fishing if they happen upon a run of good luck. Even those who practice catch-and-release angling are guilty of this habit. “If I’m not killing anything,” they reason, “why should I stop?” But as the marine conservationist Carl Safina wrote me recently, “Fish are not made to have hooks in their mouths. So if we hurt these animals, we need to have a better reason than ‘just because.’” To catch something from the wild and use it for our food is, to my mind, justifiable. To torture it for amusement is not.

So perhaps it’s time to rethink fishing. No one says that a fishing trip need only be about fishing; there are other things to learn while bobbing in a boat with your kids. We can teach our children to learn the lexicon of seabirds that still plunge into the ocean’s depths, or wonder at the whales and dolphins and seals that are much more common off American shores now than when I was a child—thanks to laws that prevent their destruction. Quiet observation is a good skill to learn. And, if all else fails to amuse them, a fishing trip could wrap up after the evening’s meal has been procured. In the end, it might be better to kill and go home rather than endlessly catch and release.

- What I Wish My Father Had Taught Me About Fishing

Peter Singer has an educational piece on the same; aptly titled If Fish Could Scream:

When I was a child, my father used to take me for walks, often along a river or by the sea. We would pass people fishing, perhaps reeling in their lines with struggling fish hooked at the end of them. Once I saw a man take a small fish out of a bucket and impale it, still wriggling, on an empty hook to use as bait.

Another time, when our path took us by a tranquil stream, I saw a man sitting and watching his line, seemingly at peace with the world, while next to him, fish he had already caught were flapping helplessly and gasping in the air. My father told me that he could not understand how anyone could enjoy an afternoon spent taking fish out of the water and letting them die slowly.

These childhood memories flooded back when I read Worse things happen at sea: the welfare of wild-caught fish, a breakthrough report released last month on fishcount.org.uk. In most of the world, it is accepted that if animals are to be killed for food, they should be killed without suffering. Regulations for slaughter generally require that animals be rendered instantly unconscious before they are killed, or death should be brought about instantaneously, or, in the case of ritual slaughter, as close to instantaneously as the religious doctrine allows.