soon. He bought back his rods, used them for two more seasons, and couldn’t stand how he felt about what he was doing to fish. He sold everything again. Even so, he’s not Catch and Deny sure the sale is final. Heart of Home 2003 “I may buy back my nine-foot-six Winston and go out for a trout dinner, or catch whitefish for a stew, going out by Ted Kerasote with the idea specifically to hunt a fish to eat it. 1’m not opposed to hunting- killing fish for food. In fact, I don’t think hunting to eat IS immoral-to go out, for instance, with a shotgun to Jack Turner, who looks like a cross rod in his hand before turning to the kill a dove and eat it-because all life between a jolly medieval monk and mountains and teaching philosophy. survives by killing and consuming the Buddha, gave up trout fishing It was his bent for philosophy, for other life. But this idea of playing with because of birds. making unusual connections and things for our own enjoyment while disquieting comparisons, that finally they go through great anguish and “It was in Berkeley;’ he says, “maybe caught up to him. suffering strikes me as wrong” ‘88 or ‘89. I heard this recording done .by the Royal Academy or someone “When I first read defenses of catch- Turner is a member of a Zen Buddhist like that. It was of fish being caught and-release fishing” he explains, school that doesn’t value life-forms by and trying to escape. You didn’t have “when it became really popular maybe their sentience. Insects, shrimp, cows, to be an expert to know that these were fifteen years ago, I had my first inkling people, trees, rocks, and mountains creatures in distress. The only thing I that I didn’t want to do it. It seemed “all deserve our care and attention” He could think of was birds:’ like a continuation of a utilitarian does, however, distinguish between philosophy that maximizes value for instrumental and gratuitous pain- It’s after dinner, and we’re standing on the group and ignores the individual. killing a fish to feed your gut and the town square of Jackson, Wyoming, It’s the perennial scientific attitude playing with a fish to feed your ego. which is virtually empty because it’s as well. Biologists don’t worry about April and off-season. Turner, one individuals. They worry about species, He now throws open his hands, taking of the principal guides at the Exum ecosystems. in the town square, the valley, and School of Mountaineering, based places beyond. “As a culture we’re just north of town in Grand Teton “Then I heard that recording and it addicted to fun” he says, “and have National Park, wears his usual tweedy made me imagine using worms and a hard time placing amusement in a coat, T-shirt, and shortly trimmed flies to catch mountain bluebirds or secondary place to other values, the white beard, making him look both pine grosbeaks, or maybe eagles and good of the environment for instance, weathered and wise. Besides having ospreys, and hauling them around on or the suffering of other beings, even led hundreds of climbers up the Grand fifty feet of line while they tried to get when we recognize those values as Teton, Turner is also known for his away. Then when you landed them, important” mountain explorations (he was the you’d release them. No one would first American to reach the north tolerate that sort of thing with birds. Turner isn’t alone in feeling side of K2), his retrospects of the But we will for fish because they’re uncomfortable about catch-andrelease early days of Yosemite climbing, and underwater, out of sight” fishing. A few days later, I’m lately his lyric writings on everything in Montana, talking with David from Buddhism to the lives of white Sometime after listening to the Quammen, whose quirky and poetic pelicans. He has also been a fishing recording, Turner sold his fishing gear- essays on nature have appeared in junkie since the age of four. Winston rods mounted with Hardy Outside for years. Like someone going reels, the best of fine trout tackle. “It through a divorce or a serious illness, “Trout, eels, everything,” he says. breaks my heart to talk about it” he I’m looking for a support group, His grandfather was halfowner of says flatly. people who have lived and lusted for a Pennsylvania fishing and hunting fishing and are now going through the lodge, and Turner grew up with a The renunciation was too much too same sort of withdrawal that I’ve been of mountain lions, inedibility isn’t is a summary of a paper he authored experiencing. one of them” He also wrote, “Nor called “Pain and Analgesia in Birds, would I argue for any absolute ethical Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fish.” Of Quammen and I sit in the old Chico distinction between the killing of a the 14,406 references to fish that he Hot Springs Lodge, commanding a mountain lion and the killing of a surveyed in the literature, only twenty- bench above the Yellowstone River trout” four matched fish and pain; of those, where it meanders through Paradise nineteen were about pain in humans Valley. It’s one of those April evenings As a slogan, “catch and release” caused by diseases contracted from when the last bit of warm sun makes was first used in the early I 960s fish. Of the remaining five references, you believe that winter is really by Richard Stroud, the head of none discussed the fact that fish might coming to a close. As with Turner, I the Sport Fishing Institute, an actually feel pain. Stoskopf concluded ask Quammen the question that no organization funded by fishing- that the scientific community, like the one in the fishing world really likes tackle manufacturers. It almost public, has a serious misconception. addressing because of the Pandora’s immediately replaced what fish and box it opens: If fish do feel pain, as game departments had been calling some evidence has begun to suggest, “fishing for fun,” a phrase coined in what does the catch-andrelease angler the late I950s by Albert Hazzard, the “Pain and pain perception in do with that knowledge? assistant executive director of the nonmammalian species must be Pennsylvania Fish Commission, for a unimportant,” he says, “or at least so Quammen, whose writings explore the program of catching trout and putting intrinsically different from the process givens of nature and the ambiguities them back in Clinton County’s Old in mammals that we need not apply of the human soul, answers slowly, Woman’s Creek. As Stroud recalls, “I our basic knowledge of mammalian almost tortuously, as if mirroring gave a speech in which I said, ‘I don’t nociception to birds, reptiles, the hard journey he’s traveled while like the term “fish for fun.” All fishing amphibians, or fishes.” But when thinking about this subject. “I’ve had is fun. So I’ll use the term “catch and Stoskopf applied basic knowledge of more and more trouble with catch- release.”’” mammalian nociception-the ability to and-release fishing as time goes on. I react to painful or injurious stimuli- haven’t stopped completely . . . and If inventing a byword insures to nonmammals, he found that they I haven’t decided that one shouldn’t immortality, Stroud’s future is secure. exhibited the four basic responses that fish,” he adds quickly, making sure In terms of societal recognition, “catch mammals do: rapid startle reactions; I understand that he’s not about to and release” is right up there with simple nonspecific flight; vocalization; offer any moral prescriptions. “But “thermos” and “Scotch tape.”’ What and “coordinated reaction,” a bit of I’ve concluded that it’s speciesist to “catch and release” doesn’t address, jargon meaning that the test individual tell ourselves that it’s a game to the of course, is “incidental kill”-the 5 to bites the source of pam. fish. It’s deadly mortal serious to I 0 percent of the trout that die from them. These animals were hysterically stress no matter how carefully they’re As for fish, they not only exhibited fighting for survival, and it didn’t handled. Warm-water fish, such “pronounced reactions to contact with matter whether you had your barbs as bass, suffer ever-higher rates of irritants or acute stimuli, including bent down” incidental kill. Least addressed in both strong muscular and behavioral the popular and professional literature avoidance” (what makes our fishing He pauses. His black shirt, flowered is whether fish-caught and killed fish reels sing their arias when we haul tie, and long hair pulled back in a or caught and released fish-feel pain a fish toward shore), but they also ponytail make him look like a rock during the process. Which is Michael showed unfamiliar responses such as musician or an eccentric physicist. K. Stoskopf’s whole point. color changes and subtle alterations This is a man who once criticized in posture and in the habitats that they cougar hunting in print, then, several Stoskopf’s easiness belies the chose. The biochemical evidence for years later, at the invitation of a cougar enormity of his message. He is a pain perception in fishes was also hard hunter who wrote him about the flaws department head at the College of to discount: The nervous systems of in his argument, accompanied the Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina teleosts (bony clude trout and salmon) man and his dog through Montana’s State University in Raleigh. Today, he produced compounds related to those mountains. Eventually, Quammen has flown across the country to speak that mammals produce when subjected ate a dinner of lion meat and wrote in at the annual meeting of the Colorado to pain. another column, “Whatever arguments Wildlife Society in Fort Collins. might be made against the hunting Stoskopf’s late-in-theday presentation Turning off his slide projector, Stoskopf smiles at the glum someone from hurting us,” I reply. being pulled in and released.” Having audience. “As you might suspect,” Long pause. “I guess so,” he says, fired his big guns on the habitat issue, he says, “these findings have searching for another comparison. “It’s Williams now makes a conciliatory profound implications for the fishing like the Puritan sex ethic. Sex is only gesture. “The people who say we community, especially the catch-and- good if you don’t enjoy it.” need to kill fish and eat them, they release segment of that community, are absolutely right, absolutely. When which bills its sport as qualitatively Before I mention that enjoyable I was on the Thorne River, one of different and somehow less injurious sex is usually between consenting America’s ten most endangered, by than hunting.” Though his words partners, Williams lets fly with catch the way, because of logging, I was make him seem antifishing, he isn’t. and release’s broadside. Citing the walking along the stream bank one “The danger,” he explains, “is being story of the threatened greenback morning. I heard what I thought was a in denial about what you’re doing cutthroat trout living in Rocky rattlesnake. It was a coastal cutthroat and then finding yourself in an Mountain National Park, he turns our jumping in the air and shaking its fins. indefensible position. discussion to the issue of species and Feeding on pink salmon fry. Hot fish habitat preservation. The greenback right out of the cold Pacific. The first “It’s also not bad to have fun,” he cutthroat trout was originally listed one I caught jumped five times and adds with a grin, “because a lot of as “endangered,” but its recovery broke me off. And all we had brought the economy’s power to implement program “went nowhere,” he says, for breakfast were sticky buns, and by important habitat benefits comes from “because no one could fish for it.” God it was pretty nice to kill a couple people enjoying themselves. That Downlisting the trout to “threatened” of those cutthroats and fry them in may mean inflicting pain in a variety and allowing catch-and-release fishing butter and eat them. If we hadn’t done of ways to individuals. It benefits the for it created a constituency. Money that, that fishing experience wouldn’t species, and it’s certainly different poured in and greenbacks increased. have been as powerful for us. And we from being cruel.” released about fifteen that we didn’t This srory has now become a classic kill.” When told of Stoskopf’s data, people and powerful ecological justification like Ted Williams go ballistic. “I don’t for catch-and-release fishing. It also His voice becomes reflective. He’s believe it,” he says, voice rising. The doesn’t stand by itself. After catch- getting to the denouement, what really conservation editor for Fly Rod and and-release regulations were instituted counts for him. “The reason I’ve Reel and a take-on-anyone columnist on Yellowstone Lake and its feeder stayed with catch and release is-it’s for Audubon, Williams regularly streams in 1973, cutthroat trout not the fight. It’s seeing the fish come infuriates both the left and the right. numbers increased as much as fourteen up, sip the fly. Just to see that. It’s Trying to keep his tone level, he says, times in some of the creeks, creating pretty neat. Being in Yellowstone is “I’ve caught bluegills off their nests profound ripple effects. In 1975, being part of the ecosystem, watching four and five times within an hour. If grizzly bears fished for cutthroats the flies dimple the water, looking at it hurt them that bad they wouldn’t in 19 percent of the lake’s feeder the sky. I don’t go to fight them. I go be behaving this way.” Williams is streams; by 1980, the bears were using to join them.” tired and disgusted with this entire 61 percent of the streams, an increase discussion. “Needless guilt and that John Varley, director of the If that’s it-just wanting to be part of contemplating our navels,” he calls Yellowstone Center for Resources and things as Williams and the rest of us it. Then he says, “It’s as simple as a man whom Williams likes to quote, have claimed-why not clip off the this. I’m a person, it’s a fish. A friend attributes directly to catch-and-release bend of the hook and simply cast the likened catch-and-release fishing regulations. Later, when I talked harmless fly? to lassoing a white-tailed deer and with Varley at park headquarters in hauling it in until it’s exhausted. But Mammoth Hot Springs, he said, “If John Betts, the renowned fly tier and it’s not analogous. If we’re going to eagles and ospreys and grizzly bears angling scholar, not only thought of believe that, we should apply further. and otters were going to vote on catch the question before I did, he thought of We shouldn’t be putting DEET on our and release as opposed to catch and the answer. Disturbed by the small but skin because it disrupts the feeding kill, we would get unanimous support inevitable percentage of trout injured activity of mosquitoes.” for the former.” while being released, Betts began to fish with flies from which the hook “But the deer analogy is about “We need to be saving habitat,” bends had been cut. Trout would rise deriving pleasure from another’s pain, Williams repeats, echoing Varley, “not to these hookless flies three, four, even while putting DEET on is to stop worrying whether the cutthroat likes half a dozen times. Damage to the fish was zero, but Betts was disappointed. release fishing and that the single hook our most famous trout waters would “Missing was the adrenaline surge that is less injurious than the treble hooks never support the numbers of trout came from the anticipation, take, and used on spinning lures. Behnke cites they do if electroshocking were really initial runs and jumps,” he wrote in controlled studies in which mortality harming the fish. American Angler, a journal devoted to did not increase with barbed hooks flyfishing and fly-tying. or with treble ones. Such evidence “Or take tagging,” he goes on, “where infuriates the purists with their hat numbered tags are inserted with wires Still needing some connection with brims studded with expensive flies, right through the fish’s body with the fish, albeit brief, Betts started to tie their barbs bent down. no evidence that it’s harming their “tag” hooks, standing for “touch and survival, growth, or well-being. In go.” They have a ringed eye at both People in the animal-rights movement fact, they carry these tags for years. ends. The business end can’t penetrate are also angry at Behnke, for he Or here’s another example of the the fish’s mouth but will hold the fish maintains that fish don’t experience difference between fish and humans: long enough for the angler to feel it on the sort of pain that a human might In coastal waters, salmon are routinely the end of his or her line, see it jump, experience with a hook in its mouth. attacked by sea lions; you see the fish maybe even get a run or two out of “If it was an experience of extreme swimming upstream with wounds that it. “My need to touch whatever I’ve trauma, comparable to a human’s would be lethal to a person.” caught,” Betts reflected, “originated in being taken to a hospital after a lessons learned millions of years ago severe injury,” he says, “you would But what about Stoskopf’s contention for reasons other than sport. Touching not likely do it again within a day. that fish feel pain because their is one of the last vestiges of our past Yet you can catch the same fish every physiological reactions to stress and may now seem our only way to day by dangling a lure in front of it. are similar to those of mammals? keep in contact with it. It also provides Cutthroats are caught and released “Similarities don’t mean that they’re a sense of validity for ourselves at about ten times each season in the feeling the same kind of pain,” Behnke the moment and later, when we tell Yellowstone River within the park. counters. Then, like Williams, he others about what we’ve done. My They would learn not to be caught points out that whether individual need to touch is now tempered by the again if they were experiencing fish actually feel what we know as realization that resources are limited extreme pain.” pain is really not the issue we should and that what I touch is becomingly be discussing. “Catch and release is increasingly scarce.” He does note that cutthroats are a management tool. Without catch notoriously easy to catch as compared and release you wouldn’t be able to Betts’s little essay generated a loud to brown trout, with rainbows ranked maintain quality fishing.” response. Half of the letters to the someplace between the two species. editor offered a variation on “Kudos Do brown trout thus feel more pain Lee Wulff, indisputably one of the for this courageous article.” Half said, than cutthroats do? Or are they just greatest fly anglers of this century, said “Let me puke.” Most people entirely smarter? the same thing more simply in 1939: missed Betts’s point about how catch- “Game fish are too valuable to be and-release fishing is being used to Since fish can’t tell us about what caught only once.” From a biological, provide angling in a time when most they’re feeling, Behnke suggests that political, and economic standpoint places have quite literally run out of we have to make inferences about their such reasoning can’t be faulted. Catch fish. pain thresholds from circumstantial and release maintains fish populations evidence. Citing electroshock and pleases anglers. Anglers vote and Not far from where Betts fishes on sampling methods, used across the they buy fishing licenses, helping Colorado’s South Platte River, another nation by fishery biologists to gather to keep fish and game departments angler, Bob Behnke, professor of information about trout populations, in business. They also buy tackle fishery biology at Colorado State he says, “Those fish are hit again and and clothing, stay in motels, eat in University, ponders many of the same again, several times in one year, with restaurants. There isn’t a chamber of questions, particularly the biblical one electric shock that makes them stiff commerce in the land that weighs a of transforming few fish into many to as a board. We know that the shock fish’s pain against its community’s feed the hungry masses. His work and causes hemorrhaging and fracturing annual revenues. his popularization of others’ research of the vertebrate column. But as far has undermined two popular angling as the trout’s continued survival and You have to seek out someone like myths-namely, that barbless hooks are growth, there’s no indication that the Jack Turner to see the crack in this necessary for successful catch-and- shocking is damaging them. Some of utilitarian armor. “We’re dealing with a group of people,” he says, slanting onto the canyon walls, the legal manifestations of justice to the “fishermen, climbers, boaters, water a deep malachite green, I hook unempowered-woman’s suffrage, for whom fun and sport are more neither. Still, I’m out again, trying to citizenship for Indians, civil rights important than virtually anything resolve my feelings about angling. legislation, the Endangered Species else and who lack restraint. We could Act, and global human rights-the further limit access to the resource. I wade upstream, between the silver action of releasing subdued fish Maybe have a lottery like in the Grand flumes, hearing the rush of the water resonates deeply in our psyches. Canyon. Raise the cost of licenses. and immersed in spray, and loving Releasing what we have caught, we We don’t have to give everyone the feel of the line-its tumescent load can then indulge ourselves in all unlimited fishing opportunities. Maybe and spring, load and spring-as I cast. the uplifting emotions of the kind this is something that can’t be done Everyone who talks about the catching steward’s noblesse oblige-the shackled everyplace. But it could be done in of fish being secondary is right: simply is set free and, in freedom, gives life Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks, being in the river is sensuous enough. to other residents of the ecosystem; which already prohibit river running. grizzly bears and eagles. In economic Ultimately, people will have to restrict Almost enough. terms, this is a “trickle up” effect. their use of nature.” What is good for the trout is also good If it were just the casting, the noise for the environment, and, no small When I point out to Turner that this of the falling water, and the slanted benefit, good for the angler’s soul would turn America into Europe, evening light, there woulcl be no since the actual death of the fish is where only the wealthy get to fish reason to put a fly on the end of the perpetrated by another creature. for trout (and where trout are killed line. We could just wade and cast. and eaten), he sighs. His calling is Few do. Most of us want a connection The tip of my line darts. I lift the rod principles, not politics. to the wild heart of the river, even if in a gesture now practiced since I it is no more tenuous than seeing the was a boy, and the weight of the fish The rivers clear, the summer warms fish come up to a hookless fly-the is sudden, absolute, and amazingly and turns to fall. I digestnot trout but heart of the heart of the river made sweet. The cutthroat splashes across ideas about trout. Like everything else manifest in its most essential gesture: the pool and rolls on the surface, the in nature, these beautiful fish, their stalking and eating prey. After all, little reel singing like a diva. For half backs like fields of wildflowers, stand trout are essential in the way we a minute, I just hold the trout because not for themselves but as an interface cannot be. They live seamlessly within I’m using a two-pound-test tippet and between humans and the primal world. their homes, within their actions, the fish is nearly that big. and within their brains. They are not Not a single one of us has to catch removed. Maybe catching them, even Finally, the fish tires and I pump it a trout to eat. Nor, for that matter, only hooking them, allows the angler closer, letting the rod and the current do those of us who hunt big animals to enter their pure state of being for do the work. After one more short like moose or elk and feed our a moment, the nonreflective alpha run, I coax the fish close and bring my families for a year have to kill them and omega of existence. It is what hand under its belly. Tucking the rod to survive. We’re making choices- wellpracticed hunting and fishing are under my arm, I slide my hand down more spiritual than economic-about all about-focusing one’s attention until the leader and pause. After a whole grounding our souls in landscape the awareness of attention disappears. year of thinking about these fish and through participation, about becoming talking to people who think about participatory citizens of a home The beauty of catch-and-release these fish (who actually think about place through the eating of what that fishing, in an age that has grown these fish more than they do about landscape produces. The wading, the dubious about causing harm to other a massacre in Rwanda or Bosnia), I casting, the stalking, the picking, the life-forms, is that it focuses that should bop it on the head and take it plowing, are the ceremonial means to attention without dire consequences home to eat. I should because I believe procure nature’s Eucharist. to the creatures toward whom that to the bottom of my soul that taking attention is directed (at least 90 responsibility for some of the deaths I wade up the Gros Ventre River, percent of the time, when the species we cause by our eating is one of the my home river, as it flows out of its is a cold-water one like trout and the key elements of right living. canyon and debouches before the fish is released quickly, in the water). Tetons. Year after year, it continues But I flick the hook out of the corner to produce as many whitefish as When we consider that we’re products of its mouth (despite Behnke’s cutthroats, but this evening, the sun of a century that has spawned many evidence, I bent down the barb) and let it swim away. I don’t want to keep it. Nor am I comfortable with letting it go. I head toward the shore, thinking, admitting that, in the end, we angle because we like the fight- otherwise all of us would be using hookless hooks. Not one angler in ten thousand does. The hook allows us to control and exert power over fish, over one of the most beautiful and seductive forms of nature, and then, because we’re nice to the fish, releasing them “unharmed,” we can receive both psychic dispensation and blessing. Needless to say, if you think about this relationship carefully, it’s not a comforting one, for it is a game of dominance followed by cathartic pardons, which, as a nonfishing friend remarked, “is one of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship.”

Hooking the fly into the line keep, I step onto the rocky bank. No one likes to hear his friends make those allusions about his fishing, especially when they have the slight ring of truth and especially after one has spent most of his life catch-and-release fishing. Hiking up the bank, my oId waders leaking water, I wish I could lay it all to rest as easily as one of my neighbors, Yvon Chouinard, does. “You know fish feel some pain,” said the old mountaineer turned master angler when I raised the issue with him, “because when you set the hook they explode. But they keep on striking,” he explained, “so I think it’s no big deal.”

His voice gaining the slightest edge of discomfort, he added, “Shit. . . causing pain. If you want to know about pain, go run a marathon. Not all pain is negative. Not that these fish seek out pain, but it’s not bugging them.” It’s as good an answer as any, if you can really believe it.