Fishing For "Sport" or "Leisure"
Imagine, if you will, that it is a beautiful morning. The sun is out and the sky is entirely blue, with not a cloud in sight. You are on the way to see family or friends, perhaps even on the way to work, when you notice a £50 note sitting on the floor..
You glance around to see if you can catch a glimpse of who dropped it, but there is no one in sight. You decide to pick it up, but the moment your fingers clutch the paper to lift it off the floor, a large, sharp hook latches on to you, piercing right through the palm of your hand.
Before you have even had the time to scream in agony, the hook begins to be pulled and you are dragged onto a nearby beach and into the water, where you - still in serious pain - cannot breathe and begin to panic.
After being pushed and pulled about for a few moments by a giant hand, and with you certain that you are going to die, and in fact eager for it because of the pain and discomfort, the hook is ripped out of your hand and you are thrown back out of the water onto the beach.
Does that sound like fun? I don't think so. More so, it sounds like an event that would traumatize you so much that you would never be able to look at, let alone touch a piece of money again.
Now I ask you to consider, how is that any different from what happens to a fish, another living creature, when one sticks a piece a bait on the end of a hook and throws it into the water?
I think if you give it some serious, unbiased thought, you will come to the conclusion that it's not so different at all. Except that the hook, in the case of the fish, goes in a far more uncomfortable place.
In spite of this, fishing is a very popular leisure activity among humans. Some do it for food, which I suppose, I can understand from their perspective. But, I simply cannot empathize with the man or woman who would consider fishing as something "fun" to do. And especially not the man or woman who would teach their child to become oblivious to basic morals by urging them to do something so fucked up in the name of "fun."
I would like to point out, that I have been fishing before in the past. Though, I never much cared for the fishing part. It was more a social thing, and while my friends were fishing I was typically having a smoke-out in the tent. But, I will not pretend that at that time it was morality that prevented me from fishing. I'm fairly certain it was just that I found it to be utterly boring.
Just like you, and probably every single person you know, I too had my sense of morality skewed by society, and it was only after years of questioning myself and retuning my moral compass that I began to think about things such as this. I think we all owe it to ourselves, and to one another, and to every fucking living thing on this Earth, to question the things we do before we do them.
To any that would justify this brutal, heartless activity by asserting that fish have shitty memories and won't remember the trauma, I should alert you to the fact that fish having short memories is a myth. A myth, that I suspect, was purposely pushed onto society to usher us to this point of inhumanity.
