On 30 Jul 2006 07:13:31 -0700, wrote:

Hi Wolfgang,

A famous Robert Hughes quote is:

"A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than
Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion."

Yet, all 'you' see is a fish?

That's all there is, Tim.

Gordon Wickstrom in, "Notes from an Old Fly Book" says:

"As we gaze at the picture, we are spared nothing. The trout's sentient
eye, filled with fear, pain, desolation, holds the angler in its
supplication - or perhaps, accusation"

Still, you just see the fish? The "look" of the trout is
indistinguishable between the pictures.

Trout have no clue about death, Tim.

Thomas McIntyre in the short piece "Being Uncool in a Cold Stream"
written for Sport's Afield wrote:

"Hemingway said some place in his oeuvre that, because we assumed a
godlike stance not in keeping with the humility of the pious, it was a
pagan act to take an animal's life. How much more pagan and godlike -
even maniamanical - then, must it be to grant an animal it's life. Now,
there is a matter more than serious enough for me."

Hemingway was a bald-faced hypocrite. I thought everyone knew that.

The modern catch and release angler, as Wolfgang demonstrated, really
seems to have lost his sense about these things. The trout, in a wet
golf game, becomes just a click, a detente, a 'trophy', if you will.
Yet, there it is, clearly, starkly, in Jeff's picture and Gustav's
painting, the trout knows it is dying, regardless of our intentions.
And we pat ourselves on the back when, after hooking and hauling the
trout, we grant it it's life in some moral delusion that this is
somehow 'good'.

Well, that's a very nice straw man you've constructed there, Tim.

A question posed here years back, "if you had to kill every legal fish
you caught would you continue to fish?". The answer was almost
unanimously no, that really, the modern fisherman doesn't even really
like to eat trout and certainly does not want the burden of having to
prepare, carry out, clean and cook their catch. I find this supremely
ironic and I would love for the sportsmen to have the streams and lakes
back on the premis that, if an angler can not see the Courbet in his
actions, than he should not be allowed astream.

Must've been a bunch of dumbasses around here while the rest of us were off
fishing that week, 'cuz I doubt the majority of roffians are so stoopid.

As anyone that flyfishes for more than just catching fish knows, the correct
answer to that question is: "Sure I'd keep fishing, but I might not keep
catching".

I fished well over an hour one day last week a popper that was missing all of
the point & barb and a good part of the bend as well, and I could get the fish
just about to hand before they'd slip free from a momentary slackening of the
leader. Because I was getting frequent strikes - like every third or fourth
cast - and the popper was grabbing a tentative hold, it didn't occur to me to
closely inspect the popper until around the tenth fish I'd hooked and
eventually lost close up.

I bet a whole industry would spring up to provide terminal gear almost
guaranteed *not* to hold a fish all the way to the net. People have already
tried Velcro-like designs with success.

Just think of the advertising possibilities, man!
I'm thinking of registering some trademark and domain names right now!

/daytripper (And you really just should admit you're a PETA shill...)