14 ms·

> One thing that keeps many people from fishing is the simple fact that they have never done it. Indeed, I think it is probably the only reason, apart from vege

• netule 8y ago
  I grew up fishing in a family that loves fishing, boating, and being near the water in general. I fished prolifically every day after school in a small stream a few kilometers from my house until I was 13 years old. I quit when one day I went out by myself (like I usually did) and within a few minutes I caught a pike. My first. I landed it to remove the hook from its mouth and that's when it wriggled violently in my hands, piercing my right hand thumb in the fleshy bit with the hook that was still attached to its mouth. At first, the hook wasn't too deep into my flesh, but the pike kept wriggling, and within seconds it came out the other side of my thumb, right through the thumbnail. I don't think I've ever felt such pain at that age. I was bleeding all over the grass, crying and panicking with this slowly dying fish attached to my hand. Reluctantly, but knowing I had to do so, I found a dagger in my tackle box and cut off the fish's head. It didn't go well and the creature died a horrible death as I cut its head off with my weak left hand, trying to ignore the pain in my right. But it was finally dead. My hand started hurting a lot. So much, in fact, that I couldn't pack up my things and ride my bike back home, so I sat down hoping that someone would come by to help me out. The pike's head still dangled from my thumb. Eventually a kid about my own age saw me (crying my eyes out) and his mother drove me home. A few hours later, I was in the doctor's office and with some local anesthetic, he cut the barbed part of the hook off and slid the rest of it out the way it entered. He thought the whole situation was kind of funny. The kid's mom who had driven me back home had wrapped up the pike in a newspaper and given it to my parents who promptly threw it in the garbage since it was covered in my blood and badly mangled from my botched up knife work. I didn't fish again until two years ago (I was 32) when I thought I'd try it again for old times' sake. I caught a fish pretty early on. It was a tiny little bass with this enormous hook of my lure poking through its upper lip. I felt like crap. If this creature felt the way that I must have felt, I couldn't continue fishing. I sold my gear on Craigslist for cheap just to get it out the house and said goodbye to it forever.
• nurettin 8y ago
  Is it ok if other animals do it?
  • veli_joza 8y ago
    The "ok" doesn't exist, just moral/ethical standards we set for ourselves. We could go by nature's standards but we can also do better (social care is nice to have). The practice of taking lives for pastime doesn't sit well with my ethical beliefs for two reasons: the first is empathy for another creature, and the other is I'm uncomfortable with destroying something so complex for no real benefit to me. It's like a child destroying sand castles others have built, amplified thousand times.
    • nurettin 8y ago
      A lot of people need fishing to survive (I've done it while living at a shore village near armutlu) so I'm not sure how imagining being shot into space via a hook solves that problem. Sounds more like first world problems.
  • leoreeves 8y ago
    Other animals kill and murder their young, we shouldn't be looking to them for moral guidance.
    • nurettin 8y ago
      There is not a person here whom I would consider as a moral guide. Not with these wild imaginations and levels of income.
• Reedx 8y ago
  > The closest way I can put it to a human is... imagine thinking you're about to bite into an apple and then being yanked, naked, into outer space by a metal hook through your face. That's nonsensical, really. It's not equivalent. Fish don't wear clothes and they don't think the same way humans do. So they're not thinking, "Yikes, I was about to eat - while naked oddly enough - but now I'm being yanked into space". Also hooks don't damage a fish mouth like it would a human mouth. Fish don't even bleed from getting caught, usually. That's how different it is. There are exceptions of course, they can get damaged or even killed with an unlucky hook, but in the case of a human it'd be exceptional if they didn't incur significant damage (both physically and mentally). So trying to say the experience would be that similar is pretty silly. > It's significantly more cruel than instantly ending the life of a cow or chicken, even if you catch and release. You mean the cows and chickens that often live their entire lives inside buildings squished together, in cages, standing in their waste, pumped up with drugs, etc? I'd say that's much more cruel. I'd rather be a fish than a cow or chicken.
• leoreeves 8y ago
  Agreed, also: >Fish caught on bait typically suffer a much higher mortality rate. About one third (33%) of fish caught on bait will die after being released and over 60% of deep hooked fish die. In general if the fish is bleeding it will not survive. And: >Researchers from Queen's University, in Belfast, have proven that when fish are subjected to pain stimuli, the signals by no means simply ebb away in the spinal cord. Scientists have discovered sensitive skin areas directly behind the gill covers of goldfish and trout. Using implanted electrodes, they have been able to show that the nerve cells located there send signals directly to the fish's brain. When researchers poked the animals with needles, a flurry of neuron messages were transmitted to the endbrain -- the very region of the brain where pain signals are also processed by birds and mammals. Your entertainment, should not come at the expense of another sentient being's suffering.
• EADGBE 8y ago
  FWIW, the fish aren't really naked in the sense that they had clothes on. "Naked" is just some constraint you put on your own life.