A Pain in the Bass
Tony Eberts
  When my daughter Nancy was small, she loved to go fishing but worried that the fish she caught (in small rivers, with worms, mostly) suffered in the process. Then one day when we were fishing The River of Golden Dreams, near Whistler, she hooked a feisty trout on a light leader and it broke off. We put on another hook and worm, and on her very next cast she had a firm take, and when she brought it in, it had the first hook and worm still stuck in its jaw! For my fishingest daughter, that was all the evidence she needed to stop worrying about suffering trout--or any other water-dwelling, cold-blooded vertebrate for that matter. Nancy has gone on to catch salmon, steelhead, char, lingcod, rockfish and surfperch, and to dig clams, collect rock oysters and mussels--and all without shedding a single tear. She can cry up a storm over a book, a movie or a boyfriend, but in the matter of critters with gills, fins or shells, her emotions are armoured with tempered steel. She has graduated to a fly rod, and I have witnessed her playing and netting a five-pound trout, hoisting it into the boat and whacking it on the head with primitive cries of triumph that would send Machinegun Kelly running for cover. And any misguided animal rights activist who popped up to criticize her would get thumped with an oar. Just as the "experts" blow hot and cold on such subjects as wine drinking and fad diets, every year or two some desperately bored scientist claims his latest million-dollar study indicates that a trout goes "ouch" when he takes a fly. Thus armed, small schools of anal retentive spoil-sports take the bait and try to throw cold water (as it were) on that greatest of all fully clothed recreations---angling. Even as other groups of scientists swear that fish-brains are not sufficiently developed to register pain, the blue-nosed paragons say they oppose sport fishing because it makes fish suffer. But that isn't their real motive. What they're really upset about is the idea of millions of people of all types and colours getting out on lakes, oceans and rivers and having fun. Similar turnip-chomping namby-pambies are out to bedevil hunters. One day we might have an organization trying to ban golf on the principle that the fairway grass suffers. Are there tiny cries of agony when you take a divot? The champions of fish comfort should switch their view from sports anglers to that messy business of dumping millions of fish (such as our roe herring) into the holds of commercial fishboats, where they slowly expire from crushing and suffocation. Meanwhile, those of us who would defend our sport--said by some to be the least objectionable way of doing nothing--can help the cause by doing our own research: get out and catch (and release) fish, promising to give up angling forever the first time one of our catches tells us that we're sadists.