Somebody Help Me Out
- This topic has 10 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated Jul 8, 2008 at 5:48 pm by
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Hey guys –
I am writing something a little outside the usual pale of what I have written and I am trying to remember something.
Zach don’t quote me on this, but I’m going to say it was Cotton – He argued it was immoral to release a fish you’ve tricked of your own fur and feather.
I thought it was Wulff that came to argue against C&R??? Dont know why but thats the name that springs to mind.
Wulff certainly did not practice C&R
Wulff certainly did not practice C&R
He didn’t in the beginning, but he became a big proponent of C&R.
Yeah, actually, Lee Wulff is widely credited as being the Johnny Appleseed of C&R in America.
I am thinking of someone much older.
Z – it’s likely that it’s IW. The later editions of Complete Angler had Cotton’s addition in them and I could have their contributions confused.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I can’t help but think LW had some feelings about the harvesting of Salmon in the context of protecting the strain.. Can’t be certain, I could be way off base. It would have been some obscure reference I read along time ago.
On the surface IW I think of as being a stuanch conservaltionist and while LW might be the forrunner for c&r, IW planted the seeds. Ive read lots of references to him and C&R. So id be surprised to find his name as arguing that C&R was immorral.
History was never a strong suit for me though 🙂
Zach, I don’t think you will find much discussion of it in the old angling literature since it is a modern practice.
I just did a quick search of Walton online, and there is not even an instance of the term “release” in his work, nor “immoral”. He does say, “the taking fish in spawning-time may be said to be against nature.” On a quick skim of Cotton I could not find a reference like to one you were thinking of. In his work, the usual expression for an effective fly is something like, “with this you may kill a trout/many.”
But as the others have pointed out, Walton was always about killing fish in a most conservative fashion, never more than one or a brace or two for himself and perhaps a friend’s meal. He also practiced limited time fishing, more spent waiting and contemplating. Wonder what he would think of fishing all day and catching and releasing 50-100 fish?
It is ironic that the catch and release fishing that first received practice in Great Britain and around which a long standing tradition developed was for coarse fish. Only in the past couple of decades has even a “sporting ticket” become available at many pay fisheries there.
According to that great scholarly reference work WikiPedia, catch and release was first introduced in the states as a management tool in the state of Michigan in 1952 as an effort to reduce the cost of stocking hatchery-raised trout. Lee Wulff promoted catch and release as he observed the Atlantic Salmon population dwindle.
I seem to recall from other sources, the first catch and release area in the country was in the early 1960s in Yellowstone Park, followed later by one on the Battenkill in the mid-60s which Wulff himself supported.
Will look forward to other comments.
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