Livebaiting for pike

[Guest Scott]

Good answer Tony, we are all minority groups under the general banner of anglers.

We all have to stick together and fight these things because if we dont it will all start to fall apart.

Imagine in a few years time the pike angler sat on the bank behind 2 rods with deadbaits watching the pike chasing fish in front of him and not catching, then along the bank wanders another angler who asks him to sign a petition to prevent keepnets being banned.

How will he react? A lot will sign and let there voice be heard, but a lot will also tell him where to put his petition and ask

"where were you we they tried to ban livebaiting"

Then how many ex-match anglers having lost their sport will be prepared to help the remaining anglers.

I'm not being over-dramatic but if live baiting gets banned in Scotland then England will be next and once the anti's have seen how easy it was to achieve then they can start chipping away at the next thing.

 

Scott (PAC Member)

[Guest tony jolley]

Well worded Scott!

My thoughts mirrored!

 

------------------

Tony B.T Jolley

[Guest BarbLess]

Don't take this the wrong way but is livebaiting, Barbed hooks, keepnets really neccesary? Barbless hooks are totally unneccesary. Surely by using these 3 implements, we as 'anglers' are only weakening our defences, but strengthen the anti angling lobbies?

I personally use lures/spinners. I think livebaiting is going to far, although I do use worms/maggots/slugs.

[Guest Nightwing]

I think I mentioned this once before, on the old fox hunting thread, but...

I'll see those of you who still want to fish, over here in the States within 15 years, mark my words. I think you have about that much time left, before the anti's have total victory over there. For those of you who think Live bait is somehow wrong, I have only this question. Where is your dead bait coming from.....? Here in the States, live bait is still the most common method. Heck, we have vending machines for worms and leaches, and every bait shop has a minnow tank, often with everything from 2" perch minnows, on up to 18" suckers used for pike and musky. It is not even given a second thought(but, we are a bunch of backward barbarians over here anyway, and proud of it!:-).

sorry for the rambling post, summer cold, and I'm all medicated up.

[Guest Tim Kelly]

Originally posted by BarbLess:

Don't take this the wrong way but is livebaiting, Barbed hooks, keepnets really neccesary? Barbless hooks are totally unneccesary. Surely by using these 3 implements, we as 'anglers' are only weakening our defences, but strengthen the anti angling lobbies?

I personally use lures/spinners. I think livebaiting is going to far, although I do use worms/maggots/slugs.

 

None of them are nessecary, but then neither is fishing for sport. Be careful what you dismiss.

 

Tim

[Guest phil dean]

Sixty years ago, when this country was at war, people took pike as food. Livebaits were used, not on rod and line, but attached to wooden boards with a curtain hook in the top for pulling them out with a boat hook, and with a livebait fighting against this float below, left to either die of exhaustion, or attract a pike.

People tied lures to the feet of geese and drove them accross a lake, gambling that the goose would beat the pike in the resulting battle.

Neither of these methods seem particularly "humane" but what were they used for? They were a means of catching food when food was in short supply and the whole nation was pulling together...so no-body thought twice about it.

Sixty years on we live in relative peace, we have factory produced foods available cheeply and easily and people want to stop the practice of livebaiting in the far more "sporting" manner of using rod and line. Half the problem is that when people don't have to worry about the lives of their family they worry about more esoteric matters. First it's whales, a mighty inteligent creature, then it's creatures bred for fur, vermin perhaps in some cases, but mammals all the same, and now it's fish, creatures which have memories lasting, in some cases, a few seconds, creatures so highly developed that they never made it out of the water, most species don't bring up their young, and they aren't advanced enough to contemplate fear or terror, they know hunger, cold and occasionally have the urge to mate...but that's it.

In Vietnam dogs are kept in cages, dragged out one by one, and killed in front of their kennel mates to be eaten as food. They're killed in front of their mates so that the others have an adrenalin rush as the fear takes them, which is supposed to make the eater of the meat more virile.

In this country we are wanting to ban a person using a fish to catch another fish, and yet we allow that barbaric practice to go on elsewhere?

Fish are going to be eaten by predators, they live for so long as the predators manage not to catch them, but if one fish is left another is taken.

The pike perch eel etc, has to eat, by putting the bait in front of them we are merely stopping another fish being taken. You can't even argue that they may go for a different type of food, we all know how obsessed perch or pike can become with fry when it's available.

We are merely catching our quary by making out bait stand out more so that it is taken, were it not this fish, it would be one of its school.

The fish does not worry about what's going to happen, the fish swims, the fish is taken, and the prey is landed, to be nursed back to health and released, probably shaken and perhaps it's insticts are modified to make fish a less attractive option...that however is pure conjecture.

At the end of the day the balance remains and the underwater world keeps plodding on in its own incredibly violent way. And the fisherman? He goes home having had a wonderful day out, having caught a good fish, and having merely linked in to that cycle of watery life.

 

I go on too much...but to ban livebaiting is not right.

 

------------------

phil,

JOIN ANMC TODAY

 

[This message has been edited by phil dean (edited 15 August 2001).]

[Guest NickInTheNorth]

Excellent post Phil.

 

Nick

[Guest TheDacer]

Most replies here are to keep livebaiting - fair enough.

 

But I can think of three reasons why it should be banned.

 

Firstly, put the boot on the other foot, I know of a couple of anglers who actually fish for the same fish some of you probably use as livebait. Imagine if your target fish were thus treated! It pisses these guys off.

 

Secondly, from the purely hypothetical point of view, Livebaiting in insustainable. If everyone of the UK's two million anglers used this technique on 'National Livebaiting Day' - that would mean the death of around ten million small fish.

 

Doesn't it worry you that this could happen on a much smaller scale - if Livebaiting were popular?

 

Thirdly, my other half isn't for or against angling. But she - as a neutral, or one of those people anglers may need to keep on their side - finds the notion of livebaiting to be offensive. If all anglers - or even most - livebaited, she would wish to see angling banned.

 

Now read that last point again.

 

Neutrals find the idea of livebaiting to be pretty offensive.

 

I think angling would clean up it's act by banning it. I do not think it is the thin end of the wedge. We all know angling has one or two "issues" which even we disagree about. (Remember the recent Stillwater Barbel post!!)

 

In my opinion, the removal of these issues would leave us united. The "fight" would then be about whether or not angling itself should be banned. And, generally speaking, we still have the public on our side.

 

But what would the same public make of livebaiting? Or of an image of an overly-full keepnet?

 

I want practices banned which give the anti-anglers something to aim at.

[Guest phil dean]

Having looked in to this a little further it would appear that the reason for the proposed ban is nothing to do with care of fish but has alot to do with maintaining the ecological balance of the waters.

Anglers have been taking bait to scotland and these have escaped and bred, making for populations of non native species threatening the very existance of some of our rarest species which still hold on to survival by a fin.

In England and Wales the transporting of live fish from one place to another is illegal without a licence, reducing the risk of disease and the potentially destructive effect of the introduction of none native species.

 

Something is needed to deal with this, though an outright ban would not seem reasonable, a ban on the transporting of fish and closer policing by water owning bodies, of this, would seem a more appropriate response.

 

------------------

phil,

JOIN ANMC TODAY

[Guest NickInTheNorth]

Originally posted by TheDacer:

In my opinion, the removal of these issues would leave us united.  The "fight" would then be about whether or not angling itself should be banned.  And, generally speaking, we still have the public on our side.

 

But what would the same public make of livebaiting?  Or of an image of an overly-full keepnet?

 

I want practices banned which give the anti-anglers something to aim at.

 

 

Unfortunately the practices which give the anti-anglers something to aim at are principally the hooking of fish. This is what they object to. Therefore to follow you argument to its logical conclusion would be to voluntarily ban angling.

 

Not a very good idea.

 

Nick

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by NickInTheNorth (edited 15 August 2001).]