The Cruelty of Sport Fishing
It is one thing to catch and eat a fish for sustenance if you are alone in a forest; it is something completely different to catch fish and kill them as a sport. Angling, or sport fishing, is when sports fishermen go out to catch fish and see who can catch the biggest one, the heaviest one, or the most exotic one. Sport fishing has its opponents and its supporters, with one side saying it is very cruel to kill living creatures as a sport while the other side claiming that it is a genuine sport and it is a fight between man and fish and it is not easy to catch them. Whichever side is right, the sport is growing in popularity.
Fishing is thought to be a gentle activity that brings people closer to nature and helps them get in touch with the world around them. But it actually is not so gentle an activity with the poor fish getting speared in the mouth with extremely sharp hooks in a bid to catch them (Animal Aid, 2010). There are many cruel aspects to fishing for fun such as the fact that pulling fish out of the water leads to them suffocating because they cannot breathe, which is added torture to the metal hook already piercing through their mouths.
Fishing is also dangerous for the environment at large. While many environmentalists actually go fishing in order to maintain the balance of fish populations through strict monitoring and scientific analysis, most people who fish for sport leave fish hooks and litter all over the place. People who go fishing inadvertently leave hooks, lines and weights behind as trash and these injure and kill many animals every year (No Fishing, 2010). Animals get caught in fishing lines, get impaled by hooks and ingest weights, while many sea animals like turtles get caught in commercial fishing nets every year.
A lot of people who love the sport of fishing claim that it is acceptable to go fishing because fish feel no pain. This theory has been effectively proved to be false by scientists. Scientists have found that a fish has 58 pain receptors around its mouth and feels more pain than humans do because fish have skin that is more easily damaged than ours. This evidence disproved the long held thought process that fish did not feel pain as humans or other mammals did. It was actually proved that they feel more pain then us and yet we continue to hunt them and capture them for fun.
A new seemingly humane fishing method has been invented as a response to the increased outcry of the animal activists. This is called the 'catch and release' method, where fish are captured and then after being weighed they are released back into the ocean. Sometimes people take pictures with the captured fish before they release them into the water. A lot of fishing enthusiasts claim that this method is absolutely fine and the fish are not harmed in any way. Catch and release fishing enthusiasts still use hooks to catch the fish and then remove the hooks before releasing the fish into the water. This type of fishing is just as bad as normal sport fishing for many reasons. First of all, the instance a fish is removed from its natural environment, it starts to suffocate and sometimes its gills and breathing system collapses (PETA, 2010). Another reason that this method is very bad for the fish is that fishermen use pliers to remove hooks from a fish's mouth and sometimes its throat and in the process can severely injure it. It was found that 46% of fish that are released back into the water die after 6 days of being released (Animal Aid, 2010).
Even though the practice of fishing for sport might be fun, it is a very cruel and unnecessary sport. There are many other sports out there that do not harm animals, do not destroy the environment and are a lot of fun at the same time. Activities such as hiking, bird watching and volunteering at animal shelters are all worthwhile activities that are much more humane than killing fish just for the sake of it. Hopefully, in the future, sport fishing with robotic fish or mechanical fish will become the norm and real fish will happily swim around free with the knowledge that no one is going to spear them any time soon.
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