If that worked, I’d imagine the act of being caught would be enough of a lesson.
Does “backflipping” hurt fish?
- Thread starter Fishyboy🐟🐟🐟
- Start date
You've got my full attention Mr Bark. I'm trying my hardest but I can't delete this comment from my head. You need to elaborate on this, hopefully with pictures, videos and maybe police caution reports to prove this type of behaviour goes on, lol.
Lol, I must admit that I take pics while fishing. Many of them involve the fish being held up briefly for the camera, held carefully and fully supported and controlled. I don't overextend the jaws of bass and certainly don't plunge my hands into the gills of any fish, which are behaviours that are still sadly common in the fishing world. I then release the fish carefully as mentioned before, taking whatever measures are required to ensure that it is breathing properly. My province mandates barbless hooks, so most fish are easily unhooked and released.
I use mostly lures; when I do use bait, it's with circle hooks, which are rarely swallowed and almost always hook the corner of the mouth.
Funny, but...I have never considered these to be "masturbatory" actions. I have to think that
Trouser Cough
may be carrying this one a bit too far...perhaps for dramatic effect...
I use mostly lures; when I do use bait, it's with circle hooks, which are rarely swallowed and almost always hook the corner of the mouth.
Funny, but...I have never considered these to be "masturbatory" actions. I have to think that
Trouser Cough
may be carrying this one a bit too far...perhaps for dramatic effect...
I will not confirm whether or not I've skipped sunfish like rocks or spun around and done shotputs with them to get them as far away as possible from my hooks
LOL! I've never heard of the practice of "backflipping" a caught and released fish,so this thread is providing some rather entertaining early morning bathroom reading,to say the least!
Alright, here goes, im gonna avoid quoting or responding to people here and just share some experiences relating to the subject matter.
I was lucky enough to go marlin fishing with my pops out of kona, HI half a lifetime ago. It was a fantastic hawaiian day, i pulled in the first fish early in the morning, a 127 lb fish. When we hooked the second a couple hours later, the fish erupted from the water several hundred yards behind the boat, breaching countless times to a height that i could only estimate as 40-50 ft in the air. When the mate set the hook for a "keeper", the fish changed its tactics and began surging to starboard in a high velocity "skipping" maneuver, covering great distances with each leap, presumably in an attempt to get around the front of the boat. After more than an hours battle the old boats engines were red hot and my pops had nearly perished under the tropical sun, but the 423 lb beauty was in the boat. It was certainly not the breaching that killed this fish, it was the aluminum baseball bat the mate used to dispatch the fish quickly and efficiently before it decapitated somebody with all the violent thrashing it was doing.
Later, i studied biology as an undergraduate in southwest virginia, where we conducted many field studies on biodiversity in the local waterways. Anybody know how biologists collect fish? Thats right--electroshocking! There is a trick to using the device with the proper voltage but you do not avoid killing some of the specimens no matter how careful you are. The ones that did perish were not wasted, but preserved later for educational purposes.
I did my senior dissertation on longline fishing...lets not even discuss how humanely most of the world gets their tuna...
Lastly, we have the pier example. Nowadays most fishing i do is at indian river inlet in delaware, sometimes the henlopen pier. Well, at the inlet, you fish from over the rocks on the bank, and for every keeper tog you catch, you catch 10 shorts. To return the shorts to the water without simply tossing them would require a treacherous climb down the rocks that would take a few minutes, my pops actually suffered a compound fracture in his arm and ribs a few years ago doing exactly this. At the pier, returning a short without simply dropping it off would require a somewhat lengthy walk....imo the fish would be more likely to suffer fatal hypoxia on that journey than any harm falling the 20-something feet to the water...i suppose we could construct some sort of rappelling fish stretcher in the future, but the locals already think we're strange enough lol.
This is fishing, people. I am no fish torturer but if you're gonna grandstand about how humanely youre doing it and how wrong others are you better just drop the pole altogether. The reality is the fish likes it no better your way than any of those listed above.
I was lucky enough to go marlin fishing with my pops out of kona, HI half a lifetime ago. It was a fantastic hawaiian day, i pulled in the first fish early in the morning, a 127 lb fish. When we hooked the second a couple hours later, the fish erupted from the water several hundred yards behind the boat, breaching countless times to a height that i could only estimate as 40-50 ft in the air. When the mate set the hook for a "keeper", the fish changed its tactics and began surging to starboard in a high velocity "skipping" maneuver, covering great distances with each leap, presumably in an attempt to get around the front of the boat. After more than an hours battle the old boats engines were red hot and my pops had nearly perished under the tropical sun, but the 423 lb beauty was in the boat. It was certainly not the breaching that killed this fish, it was the aluminum baseball bat the mate used to dispatch the fish quickly and efficiently before it decapitated somebody with all the violent thrashing it was doing.
Later, i studied biology as an undergraduate in southwest virginia, where we conducted many field studies on biodiversity in the local waterways. Anybody know how biologists collect fish? Thats right--electroshocking! There is a trick to using the device with the proper voltage but you do not avoid killing some of the specimens no matter how careful you are. The ones that did perish were not wasted, but preserved later for educational purposes.
I did my senior dissertation on longline fishing...lets not even discuss how humanely most of the world gets their tuna...
Lastly, we have the pier example. Nowadays most fishing i do is at indian river inlet in delaware, sometimes the henlopen pier. Well, at the inlet, you fish from over the rocks on the bank, and for every keeper tog you catch, you catch 10 shorts. To return the shorts to the water without simply tossing them would require a treacherous climb down the rocks that would take a few minutes, my pops actually suffered a compound fracture in his arm and ribs a few years ago doing exactly this. At the pier, returning a short without simply dropping it off would require a somewhat lengthy walk....imo the fish would be more likely to suffer fatal hypoxia on that journey than any harm falling the 20-something feet to the water...i suppose we could construct some sort of rappelling fish stretcher in the future, but the locals already think we're strange enough lol.
This is fishing, people. I am no fish torturer but if you're gonna grandstand about how humanely youre doing it and how wrong others are you better just drop the pole altogether. The reality is the fish likes it no better your way than any of those listed above.
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Fishing is a blood sport, plain and simple. Live release fishing is supposed to be a, shall we say, more or less bloodless offshoot, but of course it doesn't always work out that way. Some fish are gonna die; it's that simple. You are 100% correct; if one can't face that reality, one had better not start fishing.
But using all those extreme examples and equating them to frisbee-tossing a hapless sunfish is really a reach. The fact that a guy in the Pacific is hooking a Marlin that swims like a freight-train and spends most of its time airborne...in no way justifies, IMHO, tossing a Rock Bass like a dog-fetch toy.
"Yes, officer, I was doing 70 in a 50 zone...but there are guys right now at Indianapolis doing laps at 200! It's the same thing!" No...no, it isn't.
That's what the point of this thread was: opinions. It's not grandstanding to express a different opinion, and to attempt to explain the difference.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, IMHO...I eat meat that I get by killing animals, including fish. I do it myself, rather than paying an unknown slaughterhouse worker to do the deed for me. I am not squeamish. But, at the same time...I try to avoid the use of live bait, simply because I don't enjoy putting a hook through a fish. I won't use frogs at all, simply because...I like frogs.
Worms and leeches are, hypocritically, still on the table. Anyone who does use live bait is probably aware of all the myriad subtleties of how to put it on the hook, with an eye towards maximizing the time it remains live and active and attractive to predators. So, yeah...this is, by definition...torture...IMHO.I don't use ultralight tackle, either; I am going for the heaviest tackle that still allows the placement of a lure or bait effectively, and does not scare off my quarry, while still allowing me to land it a bit "green"...rather than fighting it to utter near-death exhaustion, as in the old days, and as mentioned by
Trouser Cough
. I want the thing to live, so I don't want to fight it to death...IMHO... We can carry the analogy over into the aquarium hobby very easily. If I have a fish that requires "euthanization"...I use either my thumb, a brick or an icepick, depending upon the size of the critter...and IMHO the result is far more humane than what is accomplished by those sensitive types who insist on clove oil or other concoctions, and then spend hours on the internet discussing the best way to "euthanize" a creature an inch long. Oh, and if a fish dies in my tank...that's what it does, it dies. It doesn't "pass on" or "go to swim under the Rainbow Bridge" (yeah, I've read that on another forum...) or any other silly s**t. It dies, and we should own up to that and not sugar-coat it...IMHO.
That's what this thread is about: opinions. Expressing one shouldn't be taken as an indictment of another...IMHO.
Fishing is a blood sport, plain and simple. Live release fishing is supposed to be a, shall we say, more or less bloodless offshoot, but of course it doesn't always work out that way. Some fish are gonna die; it's that simple. You are 100% correct; if one can't face that reality, one had better not start fishing.
But using all those extreme examples and equating them to frisbee-tossing a hapless sunfish is really a reach. The fact that a guy in the Pacific is hooking a Marlin that swims like a freight-train and spends most of its time airborne...in no way justifies, IMHO, tossing a Rock Bass like a dog-fetch toy.
"Yes, officer, I was doing 70 in a 50 zone...but there are guys right now at Indianapolis doing laps at 200! It's the same thing!" No...no, it isn't.
That's what the point of this thread was: opinions. It's not grandstanding to express a different opinion, and to attempt to explain the difference.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, IMHO...I eat meat that I get by killing animals, including fish. I do it myself, rather than paying an unknown slaughterhouse worker to do the deed for me. I am not squeamish. But, at the same time...I try to avoid the use of live bait, simply because I don't enjoy putting a hook through a fish. I won't use frogs at all, simply because...I like frogs.
I don't use ultralight tackle, either; I am going for the heaviest tackle that still allows the placement of a lure or bait effectively, and does not scare off my quarry, while still allowing me to land it a bit "green"...rather than fighting it to utter near-death exhaustion, as in the old days, and as mentioned by
We can carry the analogy over into the aquarium hobby very easily. If I have a fish that requires "euthanization"...I use either my thumb, a brick or an icepick, depending upon the size of the critter...and IMHO the result is far more humane than what is accomplished by those sensitive types who insist on clove oil or other concoctions, and then spend hours on the internet discussing the best way to "euthanize" a creature an inch long. Oh, and if a fish dies in my tank...that's what it does, it dies. It doesn't "pass on" or "go to swim under the Rainbow Bridge" (yeah, I've read that on another forum...) or any other silly s**t. It dies, and we should own up to that and not sugar-coat it...IMHO.
That's what this thread is about: opinions. Expressing one shouldn't be taken as an indictment of another...IMHO.
I can concede that the sunny toss was an unnecessary practice and probably didnt accomplish what we were trying to do. But in no way are any of my examples above "extreme". If anything, they are all very common occurences. At least in the world i live in. Neither were they opinions, but rather observations based on actual experience. Yours is noted though.
