PREVIOUS ARTICLES ARCHIVE >>> Us and Them If you are anything like me, then you probably get annoyed when someone unfairly includes you in a group to which you feel you don’t belong. You feel that mix of embarrassment and anger when, say, a violent yob with a swastika tattooed on his forehead presumes to speak for your team or country. Or maybe you feel like putting your hand in the air - just to point out one or two distinctions - when, because you like to do a little fly fishing on the weekend, the guy with the macramé waistcoat and the bull-horn lumps you in with Pol Pot and Jeffrey Dalmer. Some British anglers are rather vexed by their connection with hunting, and in particular hunting with hounds. There seems, in their minds, to be a real gulf between them - the toffee-nosed girls with the oval accents and jodhpurs - and us, the contemplative and innocent souls in the big rubber pants. This, it seems to me, is where all the trouble begins. It’s not so much a matter of principle, but a matter of style. In principle, at least from the quarry’s point of view, it’s all pretty academic. The important thing for them - fish, fox, or fowl - is to get through the day in one piece, preferably with a full belly. To them, you’re another everyday concern which goes with the territory - in the same class as hawks, herons, pike, farm dogs, killer whales, lions, and wolves - just another competitor or predator, and, frankly, they couldn’t give a hoot whether those chasing them are wearing the pink, their own fur, or a camouflage muu-muu. To the so-called ‘anti’, the thing hinges on what they see as animal ‘rights’. By this, it is to be presumed, is meant the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, stopping short (so far at least) of full citizenship. The special anti-fishing unit, dedicated to making the lives of anglers miserable, ignoring the issue of rights and duties, extends this idea of individual rights to fish, arbitrarily drawing the ‘survival of the cutest’ line just above other sentient creatures, such as rats, jelly fish, slugs, spiders, and cockroaches - which, one must admit, are rather nasty. To these people, all hunting and killing, by man at least, is bad. This is the children’s book world of Tommy Trout, in which the innocent Mr and Mrs Fish, and all the little fishes, live in the constant and menacing shadow of Man, the fun-loving serial killer. To avoid being classed with the hunting crowd, who, admittedly, indulge in a rather ostentatious glee regarding the excitements of the chase, some anglers get themselves up a philosophical gum tree in the attempt to disassociate themselves from that which bothers them most about our own pursuit - pleasure. This, I see, as the puritanical approach to angling, in which the angler lives in a constant state of denial and guilt because we enjoy it so much. Fishing, like hunting, and sex, is deeply and naturally pleasurable. The pleasure is deep, complex, holistic, even spiritual, and a different thing from mere fun - a distinction which only someone who has experienced both will recognise. The philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Hunting, goes further, and proposes that hunting, being so integral to our essential humanity, is actually a form of happiness. To me, if we extend the idea to fly fishing, that seems to have the right ring to it. Fishing, after all, is not just some daft game but a kind of hunting - only wetter. Anyway, in an effort to rationalise the love of fly fishing, with the puritanical denial of pleasure, these guilty anglers hang their philosophical hats on one thing - the pursuit of fish as food. This idea is most clearly presented in a fine book by A. A. Luce, written in the 50's, called Fishing and Thinking, in which Luce, a religious scholar, outlines the moral - and religious - underpinnings to this position. His is the best formulated argument against the concept of catch and release angling. Luce is god-fearing and sincere, but, he relies heavily on a selective interpretation of some Old Testament aphorisms, and a received puritanical view of the wrongness of pleasure for its own sake. His central principle, I’m afraid, amounts to no more than an intellectual conceit. He calls it the ‘balance of pleasure’, and he means that the pleasure we get from angling is unintentional, and therefore guilt-free. What we are really after, he asserts, is lunch. Well, I’m sorry Reverend, but, hand on heart, I can’t say that I fish for anything but pleasure. Although, for some, it is maybe playing a little off-side, I take the position that fly fishing is what trout and salmon are for. No one is going to convince me that trout and salmon would exist in the numbers they do in Britain, or anywhere else, or that the rivers would have been preserved, even to the degree they have, if it wasn’t for angling as pleasure. The whole British, now universal, sporting tradition - the concept of ‘fair chase’ - is based in pleasure. It is the quarry as food which is incidental. Anyway, as good as they may taste, the effort and resources spent on acquiring the calories and protein in a trout is absurd. Pound for pound, a fly-caught trout, when you factor in all the costs for equipment, travel, permits, special clothing, etc, falls into the same dietary category as, say, lark’s tongues. Nope, we have to forget the worthy puritanism of the food argument. We should recognise that, apart from aspects of style, social distinctions, and maybe the degree of intensity, anglers are also hunters. We should accept that arguing for fly fishing as the pursuit of food will not win anybody around, especially if we are arguing on the basis of necessity. And if we think we will pull the wool over the ‘anti’s’ eyes, by disingenuously presenting the food argument as our public position, while secretly knowing that we do it for pleaure, we’ve got another think coming. That’s just another version of the fox hunter’s ‘pest control’ defence, possibly the dumbest argument they could have used. Like using a Ferrari as a golf cart. Food for the belly is one thing - food for the soul is something else, and just as necessary, given the pressures of urban existence. The welfare of wild trout and salmon, and the waters they live in, are utterly dependent upon the concept of use. Whether we kill them or not, sport fishing, particularly fly fishing, with its built-in selectivity, is good for fish. Wild trout and salmon cannot exist outwith the protection of sport fishing. To survive in contemporary Britain, trout and salmon have to be useful for something. I propose that human pleasure and happiness, within a consensual framework of social and ecological responsibility, is enough.