Am I alone in finding it hard to reconcile Lewis Baldwin's obvious love of river fishing and the notion of fishing in a large pond stocked with imported fish?
I know Stu Gillham and I wish him well with his venture. Nor do I want to stop anyone enjoying fishing in Thailand for South American fish. But there is an ethical dimension to this.
We all know the damage that has been wrought on the natural world by alien species, from signal crayfish to zebra mussels, killer shrimps in Grafham to mink. In general, the introduction of alien species almost invariably turns to environmental damage and even complete loss of native fauna.
I know Stu's fishery is an enclosed stillwater from which it is extremely unlikely that anything will escape. Except perhaps a south American fish parasite that came with the arapaima or the catfish. Or perhaps the larvae of some insect that arrived in the water. Or a bacterium which doesn't belong in Thailand. With no natural defence against these things, the potential for disaster seems to me to be a problem.
Currently, our trees are struggling to cope with a number of diseases which have arrived with foreign garden plants, and it's likely that we will lose more than half of our wild oaks and perhaps all of our ash trees. Moving species across the globe is a bad thing.
Sure, I fish for rainbow trout and carp; those genies are out of the bottle. But that's no reason for mankind to continue what has been a process which has damaged lakes and rivers the world over.