On 17 Sep, 19:54, Halfordian Golfer wrote:

This might seem orthogonal to your subject but I suggest that it is
not. Fishing, first and foremost, should be about reaping the bounty
of the earth. To ignore or to eschew what we produce as legitimate
"agriculture" efforts makes no sense to me. We augment what we eat all
the time. Yes, we find wile asparagus in the fence ditch some springs
if we get there first but, if we want asparagus, we normally have to
get it from a farmer. No question the former is usually better, but it
is not always the case.

Your pal,

Halfordian Golfer
It is impossible to catch and release a wild fish.

That is basically an ethical standpoint, and although I agree with
most of it, it is a personal view.

Pressure on the environment is increasing all the time, and anything
which increases that pressure purely in order to produce inferior
creatures mainly as playthings, is not a good idea.

Many anglers consider themselves nature lovers and conservationists.
This is hardly reconcilable with angling for stocked fish. Not many
people go hunting for domesticated animals either.

Quite a few people who are made aware of how stocked trout are
produced cease to fish for them.

Also, the main reason for introducing catch and release on many
stocked trout fisheries, is that people don´t want the fish, they just
want to play with them. There are many instances of people catching
such fish on stocked non catch and release fisheries, and discarding
them afterwards.

One can not do much about these things, merely try to make people
aware of them. What the individual then decides to do, is a matter for
him to decide.

In those cases where catch and release is being used to relieve
pressure on wild fish stocks, it may be justifiable, although
personally I believe that catch and release is an angler management
tool, and has little to do with saving the fish. Catch and release of
stocked sterile fish, is a different matter, and is indeed purely an
angler management tool. More anglers pay more money to catch the same
fish.

The quality of the experience also deteriorates considerably. There
are invariably large concentrations of anglers at such places, and
their behaviour also changes. They often stand in one spot all day
long, guarding it fiercely.

Much of the happy anticipation of a normal river angler, who might
catch a nice fish on a river now and again, is gone. All the fish are
a certain size, much larger than one might catch under normal
conditions, and some are very large indeed. There are also many more
of them. Indeed, in many places there simply are no smaller fish at
all.

I don´t really think there are any solutions to these problems, they
have become normal, and people accept them as such.

The only way to solve many of the current problems, would be to reduce
the population considerably, and educate the rest, and this is not
likely to happen.

TL
MC