I wish that I could relate a tale of spending many happy childhood days on the riverbank or lochside with my dad, or even more quirky, with some cranky old black-sheep uncle, learning how to fish.
But I can’t. My dad worked pretty much seven days a week and two nights overtime all through my childhood and into my teens. Back then, and even into my twenties and thirties when I should have known better, I thought that the time he did get off was wasted in the pub and betting shops. But maturity has come to me at long last and I realise now that the guy worked harder than most to give me and my brother and sister everything he didn’t have and the kind of start in life that I really should have appreciated much more than I did. Therefore, he earned the right to do whatever he wanted with his time off, even if it didn’t meet with my outrageously high expectations of what a parent should be. Sorry dad.
So I learned to fish as a bit of a black sheep myself – no one else in my family had ever fished before. It was the same with music; I learned to be a more than passable rock guitar player once upon a time, and there was not another soul even in the extended clan who played guitar. Maybe I was a chimera.
I can still remember with the utmost clarity my first ever fishing trip. I was about, oh, seven or eight I think and a rumour had spread like wildfire that there were perch and even pike in the local pond. This pond was really an old coal tip that had partially filled with shallow water and some local guys had put in some fish. My friend and I went down armed with a bamboo cane, some string attached to the end, a small thread bobbin for a float and a bent safety pin with a worm impaled on it. Huckleberry Finn eat your heart out.
The place was heaving with people; shoulder to shoulder with all manner of tackle –some home made like ours and others store-bought. Every so often, someone would catch a small perch and one guy even caught a pike!
Of course I caught nothing. I badgered and cajoled my dad and eventually he got an old fibreglass rod from a pal in the pub and a fixed spool reel for me “to borrow”. It was never returned, eventually and unbelievably being converted into my first fly-rod and reel, and probably it was loaned on the full expectation that would be the last the unknown owner would see of it, but I tried really hard with that rig in that little local pond for ages.
I still caught nothing, but fishing caught me.
And that’s kinda how I hope that it will catch my own kids. Ever since they were born, I have been determined that they will not grow up believing that food comes in shrink-wrapped plastic packs from supermarkets. I don’t necessarily want them to develop a taste for raw meat you understand, but I have always felt that if you kill an animal or fish, gut it, skin or otherwise clean it and then eat it, you gain a respect for the meat that you simply cannot find in freezer food. You also eat less of it, and that in these days of excess is important.
I can no longer sit quiet when I hear people droning on about animal welfare and how “Man is the only animal that kills for fun”. What about cats? Have they never seen them kill just for the hell of it? Lets go even bigger and into the more Disney-friendly creatures: what about dolphins and orcas – lots of scientific studies have now been carried out on these cetaceans proving that they have a lot of fun whilst killing their food. Sometimes they kill without even eating the prey – isn’t that killing for fun alone? And as for animal welfare, I think that everyone should visit a chicken farm or an abattoir at least once in their lives and see what goes on with our so-called “humanely-killed” food.
Even vegetarians aren’t exempt: if you drive a car, wear clothes or just live in the modern world you contribute to mass, indiscriminate slaughter. The pollution we all create, every day, both directly and indirectly as a result of the manufacturing processes “necessary” to keep us in the manner we have become accustomed to, causes mass devastation in soil, rivers, lakes, oceans and atmosphere alike. Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening or that we can be absolved from responsibility.
I suppose that we could all go back to being cave-dwellers. But then again, we’d all have to be pretty good hunters to survive that.
I’m not immune to the arguments of so-called conservationists, but I don’t like single issue politics and I like even less the anthropomorphism of wild creatures into cuddly-wuddly-fluffy-wuffy-Disney-toons that have huge eyes and love their parents and always do THE RIGHT THING and can talk to each other in American accents.
Gimme the ageing rock guitarist, now turned legendary bow-hunter, Ted Nugent’s t-shirt honesty anyday (it rejoices “I Kill ‘em and I Grill ‘em”).
And, yes, many people DO have fun, take pleasure and generally get off on fishing and hunting. It’s not a singular pleasure in the death of the animal or fish of itself that does it, it’s the whole experience end-to-end that gives the pleasure. It’s not possible to explain it properly; you either get that or you don’t. And it’s certainly not PC to admit to it. But I admit it – I enjoy what I do and occasionally some animal, bird or fish will die because of the pursuit of my enjoyment. But that creature will be eaten and relished and respected, and that, for now, has to be good enough for me. Do I enjoy it as much if I don’t catch anything? No, I don’t. Do I enjoy it as much if I do catch something and it gets away or I let it go? Absolutely.
Someone once wrote that it was a throwback to the days when we were really hungry; that pleasure at catching something meant the difference between eating and starving. I can’t vouch for that, but I like the sound of it if only because it helps explain the primal pleasure I get when I do catch something. I’m not happy about the creature’s pain, but I am happy that I have caught it nonetheless. So I somehow feel it necessary to “harvest” one every now and again, to remind myself of why it’s important to me to do this.
And I want that to be important to my kids too. I want it so much that I am prepared to do what I can to make sure that the wild places needed for this will actually exist when they grow up and that’s even more important. I don’t want the land or the rivers or the oceans fenced off like some great Conservation Area that excludes people; I want people to be a part of that world. We are a product, after all, of evolution like it or not. Since when did the conservationists evolve us out of it all?
My friend Gerard has a small estate and he hunts it relentlessly. Absolutely relentlessly. And yet it is alive with wildlife because not only does he hunt it, he makes sure that it is managed with game and wildlife in mind. I see more song-birds and finches as well as masses of game on this land than there exists on any other equivalent land in the area, some of which is owned by so-called “conservationists” who frown on Gerard’s hunting proclivities.
And that’s why it’s important to teach kids how to fish and hunt.
My boys have come with me since they were tiny – just look at the picture on the Introduction page for proof. I can see already that neither of them have my passion for it, but they both like to come with me and they definitely like to catch a fish or two or see Anna take game. Scott has become a very professional spin-caster and can catch more than his fair share of rainbow trout. Both he and Jamie have had a dabble at fly-fishing and have both caught their first fish.
I would never dream of dragging them out with me when I go – they only come on their terms. But I have to say that when I see them there standing beside me, a mixture of concentration and contentment on their faces whilst we all cast in our own ways to rising fish, life as a father just doesn’t get any better.
Chic McSherry October 2001