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Show HIS OTHER ENGAGEMENT a pretty spectacle and a strjking contrast to the cruelty of angling. "Look at them," she said, "how happy they are, and how safe! No fly-fishermen to stick a hook in their mouths and make them suffer. How can you bear to do it?" "Well," said Chichester, "if it comes to suffering, I doubt whether th~ fish are conscious of any such thing, as we understand it. But even if they are, they suffer twice as much, and a thousand times as long, shut up in this hot, nasty pool, as they would in being caught in proper style." "But think of the hook!" "Hurts about as much as a pin-prick." "But think of the fearful struggle, and the long, gasping agony on the shore" "There's no fear in the struggle; it's just a trial of strength and skill, like a game of football. A fish doesn't know anything about death; so he has no fear of it. And there is no gasping on the shore; nothing but a quick rap on the head with a stick, and it's all over." "But why should he be killed at all?" 76 HIS OTHER ENGaGEMENT "Well," said he, smiling, "there are reasons of taste. You eat salmon, don't you?" "Ye-e-es," she answered a little doubtfully-then with more assurance, "but remember what Wilbur Short says in that lovely chapter on 'Communion with the Catfish': I want them brought to the table in the simplest and most painless way." "And that is angling with the fly," said be, still more decidedly. "The fly is not swallowed like a bait. It sticks in the skin of the lip where there is least feeling. There is no torture in the play of a salmon. It's just a fair fight with an unknown opponent. Compare it with the other ways of bringing a fish to the table. If he's caught in a net he hangs there for hours, slowly strangled. If he's speared, half the time the spear slips and he struggles off badly wounded; and if the spear goes through him, he is flung out on the bank to bleed to death. Even if he escapes, he is sure to come to a pitiful end some day-perish by starvation when he gets too old to catch his food-or be torn to pieces by a seal, an otter, or a fish-hawk. Fly-fishing really offers him--" 77 |