The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  “Get hooked on compassion” is PETA’s advice. “Never buy or eat fish, and, instead of fishing, try hiking, canoeing, or bird watching.” A fish in your diet is about as good for you as a bull’s pancreas. “Fish flesh contains excessive amounts of protein, fat, and cholesterol.” A PETA release in the spring of 2001 was headlined PETA ASKS WARDEN TO MAKE MCVEIGH’S LAST MEAL MEATLESS. “Timothy McVeigh should not be allowed to take even one more life.” PETA goes to battle in what appears to be a thousand-front war. It is undaunted by the odds. It has two hundred and fifty thousand members. Sixty million Americans go fishing with rod and reel.

  PETA opposes fishing because fish have neurochemical systems like humans, the brain capacity to experience fear and pain, and sensitive nerve endings in their lips and mouths. Fish begin to die slowly of suffocation the moment they are pulled out of the water.

  PETA has a point.

  When I asked Willy Bemis to describe the difference between fish and mammals with regard to pain, he said there was essentially no difference to describe—“vertebrate nervous systems are pretty similar.”

  And Boyd Kynard: “Their nervous system is like ours in its basic fundamentals. And they have the same stress hormones that we have.”

  “So when fish get a hook in the mouth, they feel it?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s no question that they feel it, and it’s probably painful. It’s probably not the same kind of pain that we feel, though. It’s a really difficult area that people continue to debate. Because you can re-catch fish, I’m not sure how much they learn from that pain. Maybe not as much as we would learn.”

  “Learning is one thing, feeling is another.”

  “Whether there’s any emotional feel—the way we attach emotion to pain—is very debatable.”

  “That has to do with conditioned response. What do they feel while it’s going on—fish with hooks in their mouths?”

  “There’s no question they feel it. It’s probably some pain. I’m not sure it’s perfectly analogous for us to think about it, because our mouths are so sensitive and rich in nerves.”

  PETA:

  Hooked fish struggle out of fear and physical pain.

  PETA has larger concerns than the neurology of fish. In “Ethics in Action,” the philosopher Peter Singer quotes an Associated Press story about an undercover PETA investigator who made a videotape “that showed technicians cutting monkeys while they were still alive, slamming them into cages and suspending them in air while pumping fluids through their noses.” Stack that against a buck shad three feet off a river in leaping oscillation on a hook. Still, PETA has a point. As you stand alone in the river, such thoughts inevitably put a kind of wind knot in your cast. On the long spectrum between a mosquito and a fetus, where is a fish? When you read in Sports Afield that a shad is a “beefy silver fish, fresh from the sea, full of muscle, spirit, and flash,” the spirit is a desire to remain alive. So why not let it remain alive? Release it. Catch it and release it.

  PETA:

  Fish who are released can suffer such severe stress from being “played” that they may die even though they manage to swim away.

  PETA has a point. Anglers who release fish are not releasing the same fish they hooked. “Prolonged playing of fish, particularly when they are returned to the water subsequently, is to be deprecated,” Gathorne Medway wrote in 1997, reporting to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals on the findings of a Panel of Enquiry into Shooting and Angling. “When teleost fish are severely stressed and exercised to exhaustion, they make extensive use of their ‘white’ muscle system,” he said. “This differs from the red skeletal muscle of higher vertebrates, in that it is anaerobic and, although very efficient in the short term, when exhausted contains a great accumulation of lactic acid during the elimination of which the muscle system remains in prolonged fatigue. A completely exhausted fish will thus be almost unable to move for several hours after capture. During this time it will be at risk to attack by predators or injury from its inanimate environment.” Gathorne Medway, Fifth Earl of Cranbrook, holds a doctorate in zoology.

  So there is no free pass from PETA. The points it makes are at least as applicable to catch-and-release anglers as they are to fishermen who fill up their ice chests with meat. The philosophy of catch-and-release is variously expressed, each exposition differing somewhat from the one in the next pool; and while you lay out that long drapefold cast or spin a dart high across the river, they tend to echo through the mind—some with dissonance, some a little hollow, in the reach for rationale.

  Catch-and-release fishing is the most certain method yet conceived for ensuring that the same quality fish we catch today will be available tomorrow. It’s also a wonderfully satisfying thing to do.

  —GEORGE REIGER, Field & Stream

  Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.

  —LEE WULFF

  I think our own catch-and-release thing is a wonderful thing philosophically, because I think we put the emphasis on the experience, not the reward.

  —MEL KRIEGER, in a video produced by Stephen Rider Haggard

  There is strong circumstantial evidence that “pain” in fishes is not comparable to that of higher vertebrates, nor is catching a fish a very traumatic experience for the fish (otherwise catch-and-release regulations wouldn’t work).

  —ROBERT BEHNKE, Professor of Fisheries Biology, Colorado State University

  The producers would like to point out that, although the Macleans kept their catch as was common earlier in this century, enlightened fishermen today endorse a “catch- and-release” policy to assure that this priceless resource swims free to fight another day.

  —Written message at the end of the film version of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It”

  Maybe catching them, even only hooking them, allows the angler to enter their pure state of being for a moment, the nonreflective alpha and omega of existence. It is what well-practiced hunting and fishing is all about—focusing one’s attention until the awareness of intention disappears.

  —TED KERASOTE, in Orion, with head in stars

  Kerasote writes of “the beauty of catch-and-release fishing in an age that has grown dubious about causing harm to other life forms,” and asserts in amplification: “When we consider that we’re products of a century that has spawned many legal manifestations of justice to the unempowered—woman’s suffrage, citizenship for Indians, civil rights legislation, the endangered species act, and global human rights—the act of releasing subdued fish resonates deeply in our psyches. Releasing what we have caught, we can indulge ourselves in all the uplifting emotions of the kind steward’s noblesse oblige …”

  We angle because we like the fight … The hook allows us to control and exert power over fish, over one of the most beautiful and seductive forms of nature, and then, because we’re nice to the fish, releasing them “unharmed,” we can receive both psychic dispensation and blessing. Needless to say, if you think about this relationship carefully, it’s not a comforting one, for it is a game of dominance followed by cathartic pardons, which, as a non-fishing friend remarked, “is one of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship.”

  —TED KERASOTE, in Orion, returning to earth

  Sanctimoniousness is where you find it. By the early years of the twenty-first century, plenty of it was wading in rivers.

  Catch-and-release angling is becoming a religion. Although in some instances it is essential to the survival of the species sought, in others its major effect is to cloak its more evangelical practitioners in a mantle of righteousness.

  —NELSON BRYANT, New York Times

  To go a shade further than Bryant, catch-and-release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness. You can’t help wondering what sorts of things people are doing today that seem clearly right and good, yet will one day seem wrong and bad. If I were strolling through the annals of incorrectness—up past the invertible heroism of General Custer and on thr
ough the safaris of Dennis Finch-Hatton—I would expect to discern, out in the future, catch-and-release fishing. At its best it is what Thomas McGuane calls “the thrill of the release, of a trout darting from your opening hands or resting its weight very slightly in your palms underwater, then easing off.” At its worst it is dire—an unintended failure. In the words of a shad biologist who works for a firm in Pennsylvania called Ecology III Environmental Services, “A lot of good Samaritans are killing fish.” You watch a guy in Connecticut catch a shad in a boat. He sticks a finger in past a gill cover and it comes out the mouth. He lifts the shad to show its size and beauty, then lowers the shad into the water and removes his finger. Roughing gills is what biologists call “a pure death sign.” Gill membranes are sensitive, elaborate, and easily broken. When they are damaged, a fish loses its ability to extract oxygen from water. In a video called “Fishing for the American Shad,” instructor John Punola reaches for a roe shad, saying, “Shad are very fragile. I can pick him up easily by the gills.” Even the most adroit underwater release can turn loose a fish sick with stress, destined not to recover. And the more the catch-and-release angler fumbles—the more he manhandles fish up in air, twisting and yanking to disgorge the hook—the lower the chance of survival. Boyd Kynard: “That airhandling time, it’s the worst, it’s the hardest thing on them.”

  According to New Jersey shad reports, anglers in the Delaware River release four out of five shad they catch—with overall numbers in the many tens of thousands. The state has guessed that one per cent of the released fish die. Biologists guess at least half of them die. Some anglers use barbless hooks, which may reduce damage in a fish’s mouth but do not reduce stress. Some say that when a fish hits a fly, that’s it; that’s what fishing is all about; the rest is just housekeeping—an anticlimax. A few of them have used hooks with neither barbs nor points—flies tied on hooks that have eyes at both ends. Others have used bits of fur and hackle tied to sawed-off toothpicks. This avenue leads back in history to a small Chinese sage who played a lute and meditated while fishing with utmost patience. Day after day, he caught nothing. Eventually, someone asked him what he was using for bait. He lifted his line out of the water. Nothing was on it, not even a hook.

  I once had a waking dream in a large pavilion with open sides—picnic tables, a smooth concrete floor—in a Forest Service campground in Arizona. No one else was there. I was thinking dark passing thoughts about playing fish: Never say playing. You are at best torturing and at worst killing a creature you may or may not eat. Playing at one end, dying at the other—if playing is what it is, it is sadism. A man with a fly rod, waders, and Polaroids steps into the pavilion. I mean, can you see this fisherman baiting a hook with a bit of Gruyère and casting the line toward a chipmunk? The fisherman pinches some cheese on his hook. He flips the cheese to the chipmunk. The adorable little creature—Eutamias quadrivittatus —swallows. The fisherman sets the hook. The chipmunk leaps high in a shocked and wild, terrified rage. It races up posts and across beams, and somersaults through the air. It leaves the pavilion and runs flat out toward a line of trees, the reel drag clicking. Steady and attentive, the fisherman plays the chipmunk, keeping tension on the line. What is the difference between a chipmunk and a fish? “Some neurologists regard the ratio of brain to spinal cord as a promising measure of mental advance,” Stephen Jay Gould wrote. In a human being, the brain is fifty times heavier than the spinal cord. A cat? Four to one. A fish? “Fish generally dip below 1:1 (spinal cord heavier than brain).” So a fish is little more than a lively muscle, four times dumber than a cat, and the moral objection to catching one on a hook and line is pelletized anthropomorphism primed and shot from the pathetic fallacy.

  Not so fast, Lefty. Are you really “playing” that shad on your line? The word is off-putting—you are attempting to end a creature’s life. It was born here in the river, went to the Bay of Fundy, lived five years, and came back to the river to give birth to young, and now you have it on a hook at the end of a line and are moving its head from side to side as its body leaps and thrashes. Can you call that playing? Find a word for what you are doing that denigrates neither fish nor fisher. Meanwhile, Izaak W. Greenpeace, of the nail knot and the matched hatch, offers his quarry imitation food, then tortures the victim with a steel point in the mouth until the victim exhausts and flops to one side, whereupon Greenpeace, his pleasure complete, removes the point of steel and releases the battered victim. “Imagine reaching for an apple on a tree and having your hand suddenly impaled by a metal hook that drags you—the whole weight of your body pulling on that one hand—out of the air and into an atmosphere in which you cannot breathe,” PETA suggests constructively. The chipmunk fisherman turns out to have company—enough bizarre comparisons to fill an anthology. Try “lassoing a white-tailed deer and hauling it in until it’s exhausted.”

  In 1872, it was not infra dig to relish the joy of killing, and the standards of 1872, having withstood ever amplified assault, are not exactly absent now. In 1872, fourteen-year-old Teddy Roosevelt cruised up the Nile shooting birds by the dozen with his 12-gauge Lefaucheux, blasting away, in the words of his biographer David McCullough, “at anything in sight,” and slaughtering ibises, pelicans, larks, doves, wagtails, warblers, chats, grosbeaks, plovers, cranes, pigeons, peewees, zick-zacks, and snipes. The mature T.R., defender of the environment, shot elks and grizzlies in Wyoming in such numbers that he wrote: “I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought.” After Elliott Roosevelt killed a tiger south of Hyderabad, he wrote to his brother Teddy: “Finished her … with a spare shot from the Bone Crusher—by George, what a hole that gun makes.” And a stubborn elephant in Ceylon: “It was only after I had put sixteen bullets into him that his great, crushing weight fell down in the bamboos.” Not long after Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya, in 1913, she went on a month-long safari in the Masai Reserve, near her farm. Known to friends as Tanne and to readers as Isak Dinesen, she is described here by her biographer Judith Thurman:

  This was to be Tanne’s first prolonged experience of the wild and her initiation to the rigors of safari life. She had never slept in a tent, sat up in a boma, handled a big gun, or taken a life, and before they left Bror gave her a rifle with a telescopic sight and some instruction. There is a photograph of her doing target practice outside the house, dressed in a very smart tweed suit, black pumps, and a felt hat. She was, in fact, quite unprepared for her own blood lust. A week into the safari, drunk with it, she offered her apologies to all hunters for any prior skepticism toward their “ecstasy.”

  From bases like these evolved not only Charlton Heston and the NRA but such branching antitheticals as PETA and catch-and-release fishing. In English fishing, according to Howell Raines, the Teddy Roosevelt branch consists of aristocrats and moral descendants of aristocrats, who kill fish and use the k-word to emphasize their approach to the sport. Great Britain’s catch-and-release fishermen are largely underclass blokes, who stand shoulder to shoulder on the edges of canals and mutually enforce their beneficent code. In England, working-class fishermen are known as “coarse fishermen,” Raines says. “They are the most militant catch-and-release fishermen in the world.”

  Looking back through history at such attitudes, pause in the days of Grover Cleveland. You find him lamenting not that people thought ill of him for killing fish but that fishermen in his time were looked upon as lazy, a viewpoint that did not exclude presidents. Cleveland fished all his life, and was the author of “Fishing and Shooting Sketches” (1906). It is fair to call him an aggressive live-bait angler. On Duncan Lake in New Hampshire, luckless, he noticed a kid in a boat catching bass. He rowed over, got into the kid’s boat, baited his own hook with one of the kid’s live crickets, and said, “Just call me Cleve.” He started catching bass. In time, a carriage appeared on the shore of the lake and its driver called out, “Mr. President, it’s time to leave.” The kid grew up to be the Chief Constable of Tamworth, New Hampshire, and
told his story to Marjory Gane Harkness (“The Tamworth Narrative,” Shiver Mountain Press, 1958).

  In June, 1876, bivouacked on Goose Creek in northern Wyoming, General George Crook caught seventy trout in one afternoon. He and his thousand U.S. soldiers and more than two hundred and fifty native allies had been repulsed by Sioux warriors on Rosebud Creek in Montana and had withdrawn to Goose Creek to think it over. They camped there three weeks, during which the Seventh Cavalry, sixty miles northwest, was destroyed beside the Little Bighorn River and the troops on Goose Creek caught fifteen thousand trout.

  “I frankly don’t see much difference between the catch-and-release fish counters of today and General Crook’s soldiers,” I once remarked to Boyd Kynard. “These bean counters say to me that they’re not happy to be standing in the river unless they get a certain level of pleasure out of it, whatever that pleasure is.”

  He said, “Entertainment.”

  I said, “I’m a different kind of fisherman. I like to eat the fish, and I don’t catch nearly as many.”

  He said, “Most people don’t eat the fish.”

  My desire to achieve a fifty-shad day having evaporated long ago, I said, “If I get two, I’m happy. If they get six, they’re unhappy.”