The Catch-and-Release Obsession

Catch and release - just an obsession? Asks Mark Williams

"I have a big problem with the quasi-religious zeal for catch-and-release," says Mark Williams. "Killing fish may not be the ‘bad thing’ you might suppose," he adds.

There are few advantages in getting older; these days, my limbs creak like an un-oiled door hinge each morning, my body has sprouted wobbling bulges and hair where there was once none, and I noticed this weekend that my thatch no longer delays the arrival of rain on my scalp.

But I have a reasonable memory and can look back - as I often do - on 40 years of angling experience. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but neither is fishing and I can, above all else, see the need for change.

But I have a big problem with the quasi-religious zeal for catch-and-release. Don’t misunderstand me: it was drummed into me long ago that none of us should kill anything without a compelling reason, whether that is to provide food or to protect our food. But killing is something that should be done in moderation.

As a teenager and, I confess, during my 20s I killed loads of creatures. I like a bit of pigeon shooting. I love a fresh rabbit. And I am very fond of an occasional rainbow trout, baked in foil on the barbecue. But now I will upset a few people.

I also rather like a couple of zander fillets. Gudgeon, tossed in seasoned flour and fried, are a real treat. I’ve eaten baked carp - a modest mirror that had died in the sack - and didn’t think much of it. Pike is also pants. But I have no problem with anyone who wants to clobber a couple of perch for dinner or rustle up a fried eel supper.

In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, taking a couple of coarse fish to eat was commonplace. Richard Walker did it and so did Fred J Taylor. So did loads of other anglers. So why, in the last three decades, has killing a coarse fish become the kind of heinous crime that deserves a session on the ducking stool? What has changed?

I accept that things have changed. I can look back on a childhood spent on rivers swarming with fish of every kind; the kind of stocks that guaranteed every child a smile, even if the smile was proportional to the size of fish. Those times are long gone.

Rivers have, since then, been beset with problems. The days when great gobbets of sewage and slurry wiped everything out may be past. Industry is now better regulated. But invisible evils such as pthalates persist. It’s easy to detect pollution when fish rise gasping to the surface, but chemical pollutants are far more subtle; would you know if insecticides leached into your river? No. The insects slowly die off and fish survival plummets.

Habitat degradation and over-abstraction of water have also damaged fisheries. So there are fewer fish. Surely, then, I must support any policy which prevents them being killed? No. And the reason is very simple. It’s the same reason I don’t support the fox hunting ban. It’s a smokescreen.

In the grand league of animal abuse, fox hunting doesn’t make the Conference. We have factory farming of chicken, eggs, pork and beef which exposes millions of animals to hideous and sustained cruelty; if you did this to pets you’d be banned for life from keeping them. A handful of Hooray Henrys slurping sloe gin and chasing around after dogs which, just occasionally, catch up with a fox doesn’t really matter. Not really.

So it is with an angler taking a couple of perch for tea, a pike or a panful of gudgeon. Clamping down on such things is petty and pointless. It persuades us that we are doing something about the environment when we really are not. We are just making ourselves feel righteous.

I know that the subject of ‘immigrants’ taking ‘netsful’ of coarse fish will rear its head at this point. Well, we have bylaws against this and I believe they should be used, visibly and forcefully, to prevent fish theft and illegal netting. But even this activity isn’t really an explanation of poor fishing.

Good waters support literally tons of fish which can replenish themselves (in terms of biomass) in a matter of months. The effect of pollution, inadequate flow through abstraction and poor habitat is far, far greater on them than the effect of predation - by humans, zander or even otters. To a large extent, predation is self-limiting, in that the predator moves on if success is poor. That’s not true of pollution and habitat damage.

So I suggest this; if we, as anglers, had to feed our families with what we catch, we would now be beating down the EA’s doors in anger, asking why they’ve neglected our fishing. If your daughter got mercury poisoning from the eels you fed her (and she would in Norfolk), there would be a national outcry. Killing fish may not be the ‘bad thing’ you might suppose.

And I know this for certain; if the remaining anglers who take the occasional perch or zander for supper are banned from doing so, we will lose their support and we will gain absolutely nothing at all but a smug, self-satisfied grin.