It’s hard to believe I was ever a dumb kid who considered fishing my favorite “sport.” Thinking back, I can’t possibly relate to the person I was back then. I’m disgusted when I think about the fish I killed, the attitudes I willingly adopted and the justifications I consoled myself with at the time.
As the youngest member of a fishing family, I emulated my brothers who were both commercial fishermen for a time. My father, who enjoyed sport fishing on the rare instances we had a family vacation together, displayed an almost childlike exhilaration whenever he had a fish on the line. You might say, I too got hooked on the thrill of dragging helpless fish up from the depths, if only to solve the mystery of what might be down there. Since no one else bothered to, I eventually had to ask myself, ‘What gives me the right to make a sentient being suffer just to satisfy my curiosity.’
Like so many people in the world today, my thought process was no deeper than that of my dogs, who chase tiny minnows moving in the shallows of a creek, or who nearly flip the rowboat to get a closer look at a ‘keeper’ being netted out of a lake. Of course, I know now that fish are sentient beings rather than mindless automatons, but somehow that knowledge was never passed on or happened to sink in back then.
Yet, I must have had an inkling about the unnecessary cruelty of the popular pastime even as far back as my early teens. I can still remember trying to save the non-target “bullheads” that ended up on my friends’ lines when their baited hooks sank to the bottom of the lake. After reeling in the unwanted bottom fish, they thought it great fun (“sport,” if you will) to stuff lit firecrackers down the throats of the helpless victims…
Sadly, it wasn’t until I started examining the cruelties inherent in my factory farmed food choices that I decided to finally forgo fishing and turn my back on the frivolous pastime for once and for the good of all.