What We Choose to Call Acceptable
I was talking to an old friend the other day about this and that and we got onto the topic of fishing, one which is dear to my heart. I love fishing but when I think about it, it’s not the catching that I love most. It’s the fishing bit – sometimes sitting on the rocks watching the tip of a rod for a decent strike or other times standing in a river flicking a fly at a trout that is not hungry. It is all that I need to feel at peace with the world. The catching to eat is just a bonus.
After sharing a few tall fishing stories with my friend, I told him about the time when I was a 10-year-old kid walking along Takapuna Beach after fishing off the rocks with a mate. We hadn’t caught anything, so for fun we put a bit of bait on our hooks and dragged the line along the beach to see if we could catch a seagull. Well, did we ever get a telling off. An old fella yelled at us and told us to stop immediately. He went on about cruelty to animals and the like. So, we stopped and went home empty-handed with neither a fish nor a seagull. At the time I didn’t really think I was doing anything particularly cruel or egregious.
After recalling this incident, my friend and I started talking about fishing contests and I jokingly suggested that in conjunction with this year’s Kubota Classic fishing competition, we could hold a seagull catching contest on Buffalo Beach. We could get 10 kids at a time to line up on the beach holding rods with a piece of bait on a barbless hook.
You could even burley up the beach with stale bread to bring the birds around. The biggest seagulls could be measured to decide on who gets the prizes, maybe Kubota toy tractors or the like, but all birds would be released relatively unharmed apart from a hole in the beak. After all, it would only take a couple of minutes to reel the gull in. The kids would have a ball, no creatures would die, no pollution would be released into the ocean, and everyone would be happy.
My friend looked aghast even though what I had said was said in jest and he rightly pointed out that most people would be up in arms if such a comp were to take place on Buffalo Beach. DOC rangers would prosecute the organisers under the Cruelty to Animals Act, and the general public would chase us off the beach.
We continued our musings about competitions that involve harm to animals and of course came to the conclusion that surely big game fishing for prizes should come under similar constraints as a seagull-hooking activity. My friend once again rightly pointed out that most of the fish caught are filleted or smoked and eaten by the community, except for sharks which are probably dumped in the ocean after the obligatory photo on the wharf.
That may be true, I argued, but what happens to the marlin that are released? After an hour or more fighting on the end of a large hook, how many of them die during the fight, soon after or are so depleted that they suffer a lingering death in the following days or weeks? “Which is more acceptable to people these days?” I asked him, “Ten or twenty dead marlin on the bottom of the ocean or a few seagulls with holes in their beaks? And of course there would be no possibility of eating the seagulls, because they would all be released relatively unharmed and none would be killed for prizes.”
My friend and I pondered these thoughts for a while and wondered why different standards are applied to similar situations. We wondered who besides Kubota could be persuaded to sponsor the seagull venture but eventually came to the realisation that no company, not even Kubota, would be dumb enough to do it because of course they would face a huge backlash from their customers, many of whom may be farmers who participate in the Kubota Classic.
Let’s hope that sanity will eventually prevail and a lack of big company sponsorship or support by respected fishing organisations like Legasea for large-scale commercially-driven fishing competitions will become a thing of the past, and fishing people will fish for the table and of course the pleasure of just being on or near the water. Hopefully our children will be taught to respect the life in our presently depleted oceans and shy away from the destruction that we humans have wantonly engaged in through greed, dangerous fishing methods, lack of respect and over-fishing.
Words by Ross Liggins
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