Killing in the wild & Angling

1683: 

Once upon a time people were more in touch with how animal foods came to them. Long before ‘food animals’ were held in captivity they were hunted, and without the use of high-powered rifles and four wheel drive vehicles. Back then hunting might have been essential for survival, but now it isn’t. There is a kangaroo meat industry providing income in rural areas but mostly wild animal hunting is done for pleasure. Some Australian governments are even encouraging this ‘sport’ in National Parks, allowing people to shoot at ‘feral’ animals, causing terrible injuries to the animals themselves and putting the park at risk for human visitors.

In our local harbour park, there are often a line of rods propped against the sea wall, dangerous for passing fish, dangerous as the barbed hooks on fishing lines are flicked backwards into the path of other park users who get too near. This is angling for recreation. Meanwhile commercial fishing harms whole fish populations. The fishing industry is denuding the oceans of fish with trawl nets hundreds of meters in length, dredging up both target fish and many other non-target sea creatures which are either badly injured when caught and dragged to the surface in the nets or which die in the process. Ecologically the damage to the sea environment by large-scale fishing is well known, but little is being done about it. The reason being that most of the human population eats fish; we have a vested interest in the continuation of commercial fishing.

On a smaller scale, the very popular pastime of angling is anything but benign. Our next door neighbour hangs his fishing rod over the sea wall to relax from his stressful job, as a chef. He’s an intelligent, kind man and probably never thinks for a moment that the fish he catches are sentient creatures who share with us very similar pain receptors and nervous systems. He may not realize or want to know that the fish he hooks, once landed will slowly suffocate to death over a period of twenty or so minutes.

         

He (like thousands of others) fishes for fun, unconcerned about how a fish may feel when a barbed hook pierces its mouth and is hauled out of the water and left to die a slow death. As a chef he’s dealing with animals all the time, but his ‘working-animals’ are already dead. He doesn’t have to make any connection between the living creature and the body parts he uses. He simply cooks what his customers ask for (which is mostly meat, sea foods and rich dairy concoctions) without any thought of animals suffering or dying. We become immured to the dying process, so it's likely that most people who go fishing care nothing for the creatures they ‘catch’. It doesn’t occur to them that they are causing such suffering to the fish.