pumpkinstrokemarrow

I was rather put off the other day by a story about a young lady catching a big cat fish, I thought somewhere in Norfolk. The story came with a picture of her with the fish, in a pose which suggested that the fish was not going to make it back to the water alive.

Oddly, I can find no record of this news item in Google and I cannot now lay my hands on newspaper itself, despite grubbing around in the used newspaper trough. Mr. Google did find something about a giant sturgeon caught in British Columbia and something about a giant catfish caught in Essex, with the former at least being returned to the wild alive. But why not my news item? I am fairly sure I did not imagine it.

The point being that I am put off by the idea of spending an hour to drag a fish which is much the same size as oneself out of the water alive, for sport. It is not really the thought that even if one is not killing the thing it seems quite likely that it is being damaged. It is just that toying with a large animal in this way for fun strikes me as rather unpleasant, rather in the same way as those big game hunters shooting large land animals for glory strikes me as very unpleasant. One suspects a vicious steak in these big game hunters and while I would not go that far with big fish hunters, their sport is not at all to my taste either.

And despite my not being motivated in this by animal welfare, I perhaps should have been, having been alerted to the possibility of fishy pain and consciousness as far back as June 1st 2010. I still have my copy of the book by Braithwaite on full view in my study to prove it. And she has a post graduate degree from the University of Morse & Lewis PLC so she can't be all bad.

PS: the rash of page freezes continues. As much of the page is put up on the screen, as per usual, but the screen is frozen. One cannot scroll or click - except on the back button which does still work. All very odd..