BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

Ban Angling? Why not Music?

As I sit here between meals this Christmastime, sipping from a mug of recuperative lemon green tea, I acknowledge with hearty respect the remains of the smoked salmon before me. Meanwhile, I stare at another dead salmon – a non-smoker – which stares back at me from beside its savaged acquaintance.

During the stare exchange, I ponder why a fish is a fish, and what point such creatures have in the wider scheme that is our universe. I do this because – in the face of those dullards wishing to ban angling – us fishermen should be armed with answers. We owe it to our fellow anglers to present a sound defence of our widespread national sport which brings light to so many millions.

We ought to defend the rod, hook and line in the face of today’s few woke virtue-signallers who dare presume – hilariously – that they, after so many centuries of fishing, suddenly represent the ‘rights’ of fish.

First, let us dismiss the relevant banal:

There are plenty of human reasons for fishing, farming and killing fish, we know. Fish are filled with omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins such as D and B2 (riboflavin). Fish are rich in calcium and phosphorus and a great source of minerals, such as iron, zinc, iodine, magnesium, and potassium. My charming doctor recommends eating fish at least twice per week as part of her healthy diet plan.

The dead, staring salmon on the table aside – which scares my daughter and reminds my son, Henry, of his ‘creepy’ Latin master – fish can be very therapeutic to keep. There are many benefits to having a (live) fish in one’s home, such as reducing one’s stress and improving one’s overall mood.

But neither answer scratches the surface of the deeper question of why a fish is a fish. Nor does it make much sense to all those anglers who land fish then return them to the water.

So, what is the point of fish?

Outside I hear a scream. It is one of those crazy Boxing Day swimmers jumping into the icy sea. Rather them than me. The sea is a filthy, hazardous place for which man invented boats, rods and nets; perhaps why Christ, a fan of eating fish and adviser of fishermen, chose to walk on it rather than swim in it. The screams cease. Then an answer to the question reveals itself to me – Fatalistic Optimism. Please hear me out:

A fish is a fish from the moment it first swims to the moment life is taken from it. Its life has no purpose outside biological imperatives, it simply exists. Therefore, this staring fish before me created its own meaning – a wholly individually applicable meaning which made the things it enjoyed and valued that much more significant than the humdrum in its life. Its life, like any life, was a sandbox within which it enjoyed certain freedoms and, hopefully, during its lifetime, it created a castle. Perhaps it spent its entire life worrying – depressed and fearful in the weeds – and led a shabby existence. Either which way, whether it appreciated it or not, the fish at some point conceded that beneath and above the rushing water, life can be alluring, whether via the misty grey before sunrise, or the salmon pink before sunset. It kept leaping because it could do so and meant to do so – until it could not.  

From the above, one can deduce that there was no single point to this fish. Instead, looking through a geometric prism, there were multiple points along the meandering line of its existence, including points of reproduction. If there was a general point to the direction of this meandering line, only a superior being can know. Perhaps, like a Google crawler, it reported back data to its creator? Maybe its successors will rule the universe following multiple evolutions? We will not know until we come to know, perhaps.

The fish’s present (the fish still staring at me, to persist with the same example) was relevant only while it lasted. Its past was destined to remain irrelevant, except perhaps for the data it returned on its death to its godhead, or the effect its corpse would later have on the Wightman family and their cat’s sustenance, or the relevance its life assumed as the subject of the query covered by this article.

Inevitable projection…

For to judge the value of a fish, we must recognise that, fortunately, We Humans have a superior purpose compared to fish and their value depends to a large degree on what We Humans estimate it to be. Human lives are obviously superior – they can be about learning how to love; how to love ourselves, how to love others.

Love is irrelevant to salmon, however much detractors of angling wish to anthropomorphise fish. Only seahorses, monogamous with their partners, demonstrate anything resembling love and one seldom encounters seahorse anglers on the riverbank or beach.

So, the question then becomes what is life all about for humans? A huge question. Which brings me to Stanley Kubrick’s interview in Playboy. Forget Camus and his talk of Sisyphus smiling when you are pondering the meaning of life. Forget the windbag philosophers who spend their lives dwelling on the meaning of human existence. Instead reach for the top shelf. Playboy is often replete with gems:

“The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre (a keen enjoyment of living), their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan (enthusiastic and assured vigour and liveliness). Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

_{Stanley Kubrick}

For fish, the universe (nature) must seem similarly indifferent if they have the grey matter to recognise this, which we should assume, out of the generosity of human compassion, that they do. Therefore, the fish staring at me, given its encounters in the water and need for security of company, would have been fatalistic. Since the fish – a salmon – leapt like a salmon, one can assume that it was simultaneously sufficiently optimistic to rise above nature’s obviously dark hostilities to survive to the size it reached. So, it was fatalistically optimistic. Ergo, if the fish has no purpose outside biological imperatives and simply exists, the raison d’etre of its life was fatalistic optimism. That is why this fish was a fish – and why the fish that We Humans fish exist.

We can surmise that, to fish on the one hand merely equates with the innate expectations of fish of an indifferent Mother Nature and on the other chimes with their optimism; Kubrick’s ‘supply of light’. Fish are quite the paradox; sweet and sour, schadenfreude, bathed in light and darkness like so many of us creatures on Planet Earth.

Their inferior and ubiquitous nature makes them a sustainable fruit of the seas and rivers sufficiently replicable for culling and therefore ripe for hunting. They are like apples which exist to be plucked and picked, or they will fall anyway – destined to rot and return to earth whence they came, often brutally, thanks to Mother Nature’s hand of indifference.

Whether by the sharp thwack of a priest or the quick slash of a blade, there is an element of pressure – a noblesse oblige – on the part of the angler to reflect his superiority by manifesting a painless death on the fish or returning it soonest to the waters whence it came. Certainly, industrial fishing can improve and become more sustainable. Fish farms make too many sacrifices for efficiencies.

However, the woke puritans who wish to take away the sport of angling from its millions lack Kubrick’s wise perception of nature’s indifference. They mistake my salmon for Nemo. They misappropriate rights where none are due. Yes, their demands are absurd and hypocritical. Their bearings are skew-whiff. They are akin to a group of vegan activists calling for the banning of vegan wheats because of the critter genocide wheat harvesting precipitates. They remind me of those short-sighted ‘climate emergency’ extinctionists who yell about the ‘climate emergency’ of global warming while demanding overnight solutions that inevitably return humankind to the alternative emergencies conjured by lifetimes spent freezing to death in caves in loincloths. They are as dangerously subjective as their environmental bedfellows who call for the return of wolves to the very forests in which they stroll with their infants and cockapoos.

Are they not as anti-liberal as the Taliban? They may as well call for the ban of television or music!

Let us continue to fish.

Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine.

Matthew 14:17-19 They said to him, “But we have only five loaves of bread and two fish.” Jesus said, “Bring the bread and the fish to me.” Then he told the people to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves and the two fish and, looking to heaven, he thanked God for the food.