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A code of conduct for FF and C&R?

DBH
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Post by DBH »

O I see those......... I was going to get one this year but it has been so cold and wet it is still in my mates garage! They get a clear day on Sunday’s on Scottish rivers to help themselves. According to Hugh Falkus some disturbance does the world of good to a stale low water salmon pool.

Sorry I abstract a bit of water from our catchment to grow a few crops :)
sushiyummy
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Post by sushiyummy »

Hi eccles, this is a good and interesting topic.

As noble as the topic is, I think a code of conduct is much like leaves to a tree. Perhaps there can be an augmenting this code by also looking at the root of the tree, providing a powerful context to these codes. This way there is a self generating of behavior that does not solely rely on diligence/ mantra/ dogma, but one that contains context that feels Real, Close, and Immediate.


With that said, perhaps the tree here contains these messages:
1. 'Leave your environs worthy of inheritance' and
2. 'Treat others worthy of an ally to the above cause, including the ability to remediate from the other side of your issues*'.

*A person often has to experience the limitations of one side of an issue before they can turn to the other side.
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Paul Arden
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Post by Paul Arden »

There's abstraction and there's abstraction. Using water to grow we've been doing since we started farming, the problems are when rivers are pumped in low water drought conditions. Surely one solution for these smaller rivers may be to build small reservoirs and pump when the river is in flood? (I'm not sure that this is such a problem in the UK however!)
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Eccles
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Post by Eccles »

Will,
I see what you mean. I think your sense of challenge probably steps more into an aesthetic of fishing rather than an ethical consideration. This particularly when, as you say, your easy may not be mine. Unless challenge means 1lb breaking strain tippets and 0 weight rods used on big fish then it may be argued as an ethical issue.

C&R and conservation is part of the mantra of modern fly fishing. UK coarse anglers have been doing it for donkey's years (originating I suspect in that fact that the British palate doesn't like roach). But what is C&R compared to in this context I wonder. The old practice of killing everything? Surely fly fishers would not go back that practice if there was no C&R. Judicious C&K is just as good a conservation tool I suspect* and of course no "Catch" at all is even better. This is part of the thinking behind the EU and Norway raising eyebrows at C&R and Germany and Switzerland legislating against it in some fashion. The implementation of the laws restricting C&R in the latter two countries might have been flawed but they were motivated by ethical considerations. I say this because an ethical discussion about C&R would inevitably raise this point - C&R is not the only tool in an angler's conservation box.
aye
Eccles

*This touches on a different area I am looking into. C&R inevitably changes fish populations both behaviourally and physiologically in comparison to wild populations or other harvest techniques. C&R (that is multiple C&R of the same fish which is also inevitable in many rivers) has an impact and the question is how much does it affect fitness and the more subtle interactions of a caught fish with its environment. It may not overtly result in declining populations but it could make the system much more fragile.
Eccles
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Post by Eccles »

Paul,
Yes but that really is a much broader issue. Worthy no doubt, but then I am a fisherman so my intellectual curiosity is piqued by the fishing angle and not so much by the abstraction, jet skis, kayakers etc.
C'est la vie.
Eccles
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Post by Eccles »

Sushiyummy,
The codes anglers come up with indicate their opinions about what is important in their fishing. It is the jumping off point to discuss whether the points outlined in the 'code' are ethically justifiable (in the context I am interested in). Reducing such considerations down to a handful of bullet points is of course artificial but still a useful discipline to start with - whether you call them leaves or roots.
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Post by Will »

I just reread the thread that Paul pointed to in his FP. I'd totally forgotten it and there's some brilliant stuff in there from Magnus, Rudi, Morsie etc.

Cheers Paul!

(I seem to have remained consistent in my views over the years - worrying!)

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Will
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Post by Will »

Eccles wrote:Will,
I see what you mean. I think your sense of challenge probably steps more into an aesthetic of fishing rather than an ethical consideration. This particularly when, as you say, your easy may not be mine. Unless challenge means 1lb breaking strain tippets and 0 weight rods used on big fish then it may be argued as an ethical issue.

C&R and conservation is part of the mantra of modern fly fishing. UK coarse anglers have been doing it for donkey's years (originating I suspect in that fact that the British palate doesn't like roach). But what is C&R compared to in this context I wonder. The old practice of killing everything? Surely fly fishers would not go back that practice if there was no C&R. Judicious C&K is just as good a conservation tool I suspect* and of course no "Catch" at all is even better. This is part of the thinking behind the EU and Norway raising eyebrows at C&R and Germany and Switzerland legislating against it in some fashion. The implementation of the laws restricting C&R in the latter two countries might have been flawed but they were motivated by ethical considerations. I say this because an ethical discussion about C&R would inevitably raise this point - C&R is not the only tool in an angler's conservation box.
aye
Eccles

*This touches on a different area I am looking into. C&R inevitably changes fish populations both behaviourally and physiologically in comparison to wild populations or other harvest techniques. C&R (that is multiple C&R of the same fish which is also inevitable in many rivers) has an impact and the question is how much does it affect fitness and the more subtle interactions of a caught fish with its environment. It may not overtly result in declining populations but it could make the system much more fragile.

Eccles

I don't think the sense of challenge is all about aesthetics.

I definitely would argue that consciously using inadequate tackle for the fishing you're doing is an ethical issue (no more black and white than any other issue either), I do have a slight problem with line-class records.

Also, I do think ethics come into it when fish are overly vulnerable (fish on redds for instance). Again, this being ethics you can't set a benchmark - only give guidelines for anglers to think about.

Harp's FP was excellent in that it showed that sometimes it's only when you're on the other side of the line that you realise you've crossed it. Hopefully we only do this a couple of times before it starts to sink in.

I think we're agreeing on the role of C&R within angling generally: it's not the only conservation tool in the box, agreed. But neither C&R nor C&K are justifications for angling per se. That's why I'm a little confused about why you want to develop a set of C&R based ethics as opposed to some more general ones (but if you are going down that route then the "knowing when to stop" thing should definitely come in there somewhere!).

Cheers

W.
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Paul Arden
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Post by Paul Arden »

Yes it's a broader issue, but of all users I believe it is us who should be and are most active in this area. There may be plenty if people who somehow think fishing is cruel, but apart from that they have no interest in the fish. It is us who find them fascinating, spend our lives studying and protecting them. We are part of their lives as much as they are ours. While we may catch them, it's because we like catching them that we are their best guardians. That's the root connection issue right there.

Once you knock the pain argument on the head then quite frankly there is nothing wrong and everything right about what we do. We restore rivers, we manage rivers and we care more about healthy wild populations of fish than anyone else. Even more significantly perhaps, is that we are a very large group of people from many different backgrounds with one common interest.

Cheers, Paul
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