Outdoors : PETA Feels Their Pain

If you liked the anti-hunting campaigns, you’ll love this.

PETA, the people who just want animals to be left alone, are taking on bigger game: fishing.

Stop it, they say. Stop this inhumane infliction of pain and suffering on the innocent denizens of the deep.

PETA is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, based in Washington, D.C.

PETA’s position: “Fish can and do feel pain, and it seems logical that they be accorded the same protection from suffering that all animals deserve.”

Pain? Do fish feel pain?

It’s not a new question, but, frankly, one most fishermen don’t dwell upon.

Bill Shedd, president of an Irvine fishing tackle company and a director of the American Sportfishing Assn., said, “It doesn’t really matter whether they do or they don’t. Where we begin to have a problem is when [animal rights groups] impose their thoughts and moral beliefs on the 60 million fishermen in this country.”

Can 60 million fishermen be wrong?

Phil Pister of Bishop is retired from the California Department of Fish and Game but continues his work as a highly regarded fisheries biologist. He recently won the American Fisheries Society’s top award for conservation of aquatic resources.

Do fish feel pain?

“I think they do,” Pister said. “They have pain sensory mechanisms.”

But Pister also said that he recently read a commentary about how “fishermen call hunters a bunch of cruel guys who blast a deer and let it lay there wounded, but they don’t have any trouble with hooking a poor fish and dragging it around by the mouth for half an hour . . . while most hunters shoot for a clean kill.”

Said Pister: “I don’t have any problem with that. Fish die a much more cruel death in nature than they do in being caught by a fisherman.”

Such as being eaten by bigger fish. It’s a mean world out there. At least with fishing, the fish has a choice: to bite or not to bite.

Oddly, a large part of PETA’s wrath falls on fly fishermen, who have come to be regarded, especially by themselves, as the most ethical anglers of all. Many use tiny barbless hooks so they can easily release everything they catch.

“The problem,” said Tracy Reiman, PETA’s anti-fishing campaign coordinator, “is that fish that are released after being hooked suffer potentially fatal internal injuries and the loss of their protective outer coating.

“The effects of catch and release can be devastating.”

There, she struck a nerve.

Dick Thies of Long Beach, one of nine senior advisers to the Federation of Fly Fishers, the umbrella organization for all serious practitioners in this country, said PETA’s arguments are, in a word, inane.

“It’s all based on the assumption that fish suffer pain and we are going out on purpose, inflicting pain on fish,” Thies said. “I reject that entirely. They’re cold-blooded creatures and I don’t think they feel pain.”

Besides, there is the argument that if getting hooked hurts so much, why do fish strike repeatedly at the same hook?

“Maybe they don’t know what they’re biting,” Reiman said. “It’s disguised by various kinds of bait . . . [and] humans do things over and over again even though it may cause them harm.”

Thies: “I know I have caught the same fish over and over again in certain holes on very familiar streams, which tells me they live and continue to eat. If you can fool them into thinking your artificial fly is a real aquatic insect, that is the sport of the whole thing.” The other extreme, Thies added, is the use of barbed treble hooks.

“Those terrify me,” he said. “Now we’re talking about what is sportsmanlike and what is not sportsmanlike.”

Shedd said, “If these animal-rights folks really want to do something good for the fish, the real problem is not hook and line. Millions of fish are killed and wasted every year by indiscriminate fishing methods, like gill-nets.”

On that, the sides agree.

“Overfishing disrupts the natural balance vital to the life of the world’s oceans,” PETA’s fact sheet states.

But Shedd also said, “When they say, ‘Let’s stop these sportfishermen from hurting the fish,’ the reality is it’s the sportfishermen who are looking after the fish. We pay $425 million a year into state licenses and taxes and another $200 million in federal excise taxes, and it all goes to helping to ensure that the fish have clean water and good habitat. If you take away fishing, you take away fishermen and the fish’s strongest advocates.”

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Gearing up for its anti-fishing campaign planned for next year, PETA this month commissioned surveys at seven fishing sites around North America. For Southern California, PETA enlisted the Redondo Beach group, Education and Action for Animals. EAA recently had a member dressed in a lobster costume to protest the Redondo Beach Lobster Festival.

In EAA’s survey at the Manhattan Beach Pier, about 60 participants responded to 21 questions, such as:

Do you think fish feel pain? Do you think fishing is a good activity for children? Do you believe killing animals is violent? What do you think it feels like to suffocate?

Loaded questions? Sure.

But Wendy Rhodes, EAA’s leader, said she was pleasantly surprised by some of the answers, if puzzled by others.

“Everybody but two people said that killing animals was violent,” she said. “And [to the question] ‘Do animals [including fish] feel pain?’ everybody said yes, and the vast majority also said that [fishing] was a good activity for children. So people are saying yes, they feel pain, yes, it’s violent and, yes, it’s a good activity for children.”

PETA says, “Fishing does not teach appreciation for the outdoors. It instills or reinforces insensitivity toward free living animals and life in general.”

But do fish feel pain?

PETA’s attempt to lay a guilt trip on anglers on that premise seems doomed to fail, for one reason: Most of the 60 million fishermen don’t much care.

HANDLE WITH CARE

White seabass are showing up at docks and piers along the Southern California coast with regularity, but don’t get excited yet. They’re a long way from claiming a comeback.

“We’re seeing this as more of a pattern as we get more [white seabass] out there,” says Jock Albright, coordinator of the grow-out pens for the Ocean Resources Enhancement and Hatchery Program, which recently went fully on-line with the opening of a white seabass hatchery at Carlsbad.

The problem is that most of the fish are well under the 28-inch legal catch size, but it has been so long since they were commonplace that many anglers don’t know what they’ve caught. The California Department of Fish and Game has placed ID posters at most fishing locations.

The DFG also is placing orange tags on 10% of the hatches, but some halibut and barred sand bass have similar tags. The rest of the hatched white seabass carry a tiny bar code wire implanted in one cheek that can be detected only by a sensing device.

Albright and the DFG urge anglers who catch a tagged fish to record the numbered information from the tag before throwing the fish back, tag intact, then call the DFG’s Long Beach office at (310) 590-5117.

“We’re going to ask where it was caught, when it was caught and how long it was,” said Michael Domeier, DFG project leader for marine sportfish research. “We prefer the tag be left on, but if they have no way to write down the information, clip it off--don’t pull it out--and then call.”

CATCH OF THE WEEK

An 897-pound blue marlin was caught by Malcom Binge of San Diego.

Binge was fishing on one of Victor’s pangas out of San Jose Del Cabo when the giant billfish swallowed a 10-pound skipjack tuna being slow-trolled behind the boat.

The battle, on 60-pound-test line, lasted seven hours.

Binge couldn’t be reached for comment, but Larry Burson of Jig Stop Tours in Dana Point, a representative of Victor’s, said the angler “was somehow involved with the Baja 1,000 [off-road race held earlier this month] and a friend in San Jose steered him onto a fishing boat.”

After seven hours of pumping and reeling under the Baja sun, it is not known whether Binge thanked or cursed his friend.