I was always sad when I caught a fish too small, as I felt bad for hurting it. I did not feel bad for those I would eat, however, because it felt like the natural order of things. I would end the life quickly to be more humane.

The hunter crouches in his blind
‘Neath camouflage of every kind,
And conjures up a quacking noise
To lend allure to his decoys.
This grown-up man, with pluck and luck,
Is hoping to outwit a duck.

Yes, I have. Salmon, steelhead, & whitefish with scars on their backs from narrowly missing becoming a dinner for a hawk.

I’ll post the underwater video to prove it, too.

Dang, there goes my cheap weekend entertainment! :)

Tormenting living creatures purely for entertainment isn’t very humane.

You really have to mishandle a fish to cause it to die.

Now what’s really fun is scuba spearfishing. No by catch, only the targeted species is speared. Fresh snapper, yum!!

I *love* Entourage, but this made me laugh. Not to mock you, I just found it cute for some reason. Thanks Johanna :-)

2. If fish could scream, fishing would probably attract a different sort of sportsman.

3. I’ve only gone fishing once, and all I caught was weeds. And thank goodness I did, because so many people pointed out that a caught fish will literally die every single time it is caught back because fish are unable to heal. Think about it, have you ever seen a fish with a scar? No, you haven’t. If you have you’re not thinking hard enough. I don’t know if I could live with myself knowing that I had doomed a fish to death. Unless the fish was going to be eaten anyway. Or if it would have gone on to eat the eggs of a thousand other fish, in which case I would have been some sort of fish savior. Or if they were fish stocked by the park department that would have thrown the ecosystem out of whack if you didn’t catch them. But aside from those particular cases, catch-and-release is terrible.

For one, as far as anyone knows, the ability to feel pain requires a central nervous system. Humans and fish have them; broccoli doesn’t.

For another, pain serves a useful function in motile animals that it doesn’t (and can’t) serve in plants: It tells us to get away from whatever is causing the pain, and perhaps learn to avoid it in the future. That gives us a survival advantage. But plants can’t get away from what’s “causing the pain,” so there’s no reason why plants would have evolved (or been “designed” with, if that’s your thing) the capacity to feel pain.

Finally, even if broccoli can feel pain, what does that mean for us? Maybe it means that there’s no point in being a vegetarian (since we’ve got to eat something, and eating fish is no more inhumane than eating broccoli). But it doesn’t mean it’s any less harmful to fish for sport (inflicting pain without even getting any food out of it). If anything, it just means that we shouldn’t torment broccoli for fun either.

Regarding fishing (and hunting, for that matter): this is a skill that one learns by doing. You begin when you are young and with small fish. You eventually learn to catch large fish. Once you have mastered the skill you can decide if you want to keep doing it, but it is a good skill to have. In a survival situation that skill could mean the difference between life and death.

I’m not a fan of catch-and-release as a recreational activity.