Not long ago, websites and newspapers carried the headline:
“Injecting Lips with Bee Venom Proves It: Fish Feel Pain!”
If you remember those articles, then you know that they didn’t present any first-hand reports of unbearable agony from aggrieved carp or catfish. Rather, they described how a group of scientists injected bee venom into fish lips, and then observed (as evidence of pain) head-shaking and rolling and thrashing behavior very familiar to anyone who ever injected a fish with even a non-poisoned hook. Perhaps like me, you reacted to this news by saying, “well, sure. Fish don’t seem to like being hooked. What a revelation. Did we really need bee venom to test that hypothesis?”
Perhaps we needed the bee venom to suggest the intensity of the ostensible pain, and to emphasize the sadistic cruelty of sport fishermen. At least in some interpretations of the experimental results, hooking a fish on the lip with a #18 pheasant tail on 5X tippet is very similar to putting rubber gloves on your hands, sticking a syringe into the lip of a fish, and injecting bee venom into it.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. In fact, I think bee venom-injection sounds like something from a bad science fiction paperback, while sport fishing can be viewed as a ritualized version of what fish themselves do routinely when they prey on insects and other fish. That is, it is a stealthy search based partly on the haplessness of the prey which ends in violent struggle and either escape or capture. From smolt to minnow to adulthood, a typical fish will pass very few of its living days without some degree of exposure to this painful principle; a fish is chased by herons, by otters, by other bigger fish – by its own parents! And sometimes it is raked by a claw or has its tail snipped and survives to tell the painful story (figuratively, unless there is an experiment proving that fish can talk, too). Fish live and die by the predatory sword, and on their unluckiest days, they may end up encountering the top predator of all, looming over the surface of the water and then – this would be the truly weird part for our supposedly sensitive and thoughtful fish – letting them go free, alive. Unripped-apart, unswallowed and uneaten. Is it a kind of joke? A cruel one?
Maybe it is cruel. Life is cruel. To me, animal rights extremists are like the political idealists who say communism could work, if only people weren’t so selfish and greedy – that is, if people weren’t inherently human. In the case of predatory cruelty, a ban on sport fishing could work if people weren’t also – do not try to deny it – inherently animal. Perhaps some people are better than others at completely shutting down their instincts for search and capture. Or perhaps they end up displacing those urges into other, potentially less or more harmful behavior. In any case, sport fishers are among those people who choose to pursue, often on weekends after dull, civilized days on phones and computer terminals, an activity that mimics the instinctual act of finding and capturing prey. If they choose to do it with a fly rod instead of an elephant gun or a gill net, then in my humble opinion they have chosen one of the most gentle and aesthetically pleasing of all the options.
Some might reply that it doesn’t matter if you use a daisy to do it – if you are causing needless pain to a poor wild creature then you must be a cruel, vicious sadist. But this doesn’t hold up well when measured against anecdotal evidence. In his definitive book Backcountry Bear Basics, David Smith observes that predatory bears seem far from angry: “When an animal clicks into predatory mode, the anger and stress you see during defensive aggression is absent. A black bear hunting moose calves is about as angry at the calf as a butcher is at chickens.” In fact, they seem strangely at peace when stalking a calf, with their “ears up, eyes wide open, intensely alert, yet somehow relaxed.” It’s when they feel threatened or cornered that they get apparently (that is, anthropomorphically) angry: they lower their ears, and foam at the mouth, and rush in with claws and jaws ready to inflict some seriously painful injuries.
The same can be said about most fly fishers. To the extent that hooking, fighting, and releasing a fish is predatory behavior, it hardly appears to be vicious, angry behavior. When casting and drifting flies, most fly fishers seem overcome by an intent tranquility, lost in the flow of the motions. When hooking and fighting a fish, they’re more like the hunting bear: eyes wide open and head up and alert. And then, in the strange moment of actually handling a fish to unhook it (and I can imagine the ironic sneers from animal rights activists), the prevailing feelings are of admiration and tenderness. For my part, I feel this way about it: I think the fish is beautiful. I want it to go back and recover. And that’s not selfless kindness – I want it to live to strike again another day, and to get bigger by violently killing smaller fish and insects, and to spawn prolifically, among other untoward things. On those rare occasions when I don’t want it to recover – when I want a shad or salmon to quiver and go still and give up its flesh to a well-oiled iron grill – even then, the emotions accompanying the knockout blow and the scaling and eviscerating are themselves very peaceful and solemn, with no sense of sadistic glee or malice. Quite to the contrary, there is a sense of deep, simple fulfillment which is exactly what I believe I am seeking in my sport fishing.
Let some activists try to get between me and the river, however, and then you may see something more analogous to the cornered grizzly.
I’d like to offer some anecdotal evidence of my own, based on observations of fish behavior, hoping all the while that I don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing the fish. Specifically, I’m thinking about a fish that I hooked one lovely spring afternoon on the Pit River while drifting one of my favorite nymph patterns from The Fly Shop in Redding (I’m a fly buyer, not a fly tyer, I’m afraid). It is a distinctive hare’s ear pattern from with a special flash back and a hexagonal tungsten bead head, and often the fish seem to find it irresistible. This particular fish took the irresistible fly, but then, after a short display of frantic ‘pained’ thrashing, it put on a sudden burst of strength that took me by surprise and snapped a 4x tippet. I’d had enough time to say to my buddy across the river, “this feels like a hot one!” before it departed with my nymph unattached any longer to the line.
Later on in the evening, we fished back over that same area when the fish were keying onto large mayflies on the surface. I did not fail to drift a large dry over the same lie where I had earlier hooked and lost the fish, and lo! – a nice strike and a decent-sized rainbow came to hand after a respectable fight. But one look proved that it wasn’t just any old hungry rainbow: it was exactly the same one who had seized and snapped off my hare’s ear earlier in the day. The distinctive fly was still lodged in his mouth, from which I gently removed it with some extra satisfaction at winning in the end.
This, obviously, is not proof that the fish didn’t feel pain. This fish may have been agonized by the hook of the nymph, thrown into acute depression by the experience of fighting against the line, but then driven by desperate hunger to strike the mayfly an hour later (or, agony and desperation may be as foreign to fish as Trigonometry is to a dog). But is does seem to prove that fish are not completely thrown off the rails by their ‘painful’ reactions to being hooked and fought – in other words, it ain’t the end of the world, as suggested by fish biologist Robert Benkhe:
There is strong circumstancial evedience 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).
My experience on the Pit River strongly suggests that fish keep on feeding after being hooked. Probably, they keep on fighting and spawning and doing whatever else they do down there underwater. Maybe a bit of thrashing and rolling on the end of a fly line is just to be expected for fish born into a world that includes homo sapiens, and if they survive it, as trout demonstrably do in many heavily fished catch and release waters, then it’s just another day’s work to them.
At the same time, it is another day’s play to me, and I don’t have any remote intent of giving it up because somebody stung fish with bee venom and sent out some wrongheaded conclusions for general consumption. If you can prove to me that my sport fishing threatens to make wild trout actually disappear from the rivers, then you’ve got my attention. But so long as sport fishing causes vicious, angry attack responses chiefly in animal rights activists, then by all means, fish on!
