THE WANTON WAY
"There's an Angler's law, and a court or legal law. The fisherman who
adheres to the Angler's law can't break the court law."--SETH
FIELDING.
Gentility in the limit of the catch and giving the fish its sporting
chance on light tackle constitute the ethical soul of angling. The
fisherman who stops fishing when he has a few specimens is angling;
he's an Angler. The fisherman who fishes with no limit in his catch is
merely fishing; he's a fisherman, not an Angler.
Any picture of a few fishes may illustrate the catch of the Angler,
and the photograph on Frontispiece shows the catch of the worst type
of fisherman--the wanton fish exterminator who, ignoring the Angler's
gentle law, takes his greedy mess because it is according to the
so-called legal law.
Dr. William T. Hornaday, author of _Wild Life Conservation_, _The
American Natural History_, _Our Vanishing Wild Life_, etc., and
director of the New York Zooelogical Park, has sent me the photograph
of the greedyman's catch--made near Spokane, Washington--with the
following notes:
"The great trouble [in the matter of wasteful fish-catching] is not so
much with the people who catch fish as with the brutally destructive
laws that permit fishermen to catch four or five times as many fish as
they should. There are a great many sportsmen who sincerely believe
that it is all right to take all the fish and game of all kinds that
the law allows. Whenever any destruction is waged on that basis I
always charge it to the abominably liberal laws that in many cases
seemed framed to promote destruction. Ninety-nine per cent. of the
streams of this country very soon will be so nearly destitute of fish
that fishing will become a lost art. In the Rocky Mountains the
overfishing abuse is particularly vicious and destructive because in
those cold streams the fish mature slowly, their food is very scarce
and dear, and the fish are so hungry that they are easily caught. It
is an easy matter to completely fish out a mountain stream in the
Rocky Mountain region or in the Pacific States. In the State of
Wyoming some very aggravated cases of wanton fish destruction by
indifferent rod and line fishermen have lately been brought to my
attention."
Dr. Hornaday is an Angler, and his views and practices are endorsed by
all Anglers. His great book on wild life conservation is brimful of
practical detail and should be in the library of all who are
interested in the preservation of our fishes, birds, and quadruped
game. Here is a sample of the Doctor's vigorous style in his admirable
campaign against the exterminator:
"A few years ago, certain interests in Pennsylvania raised a great
public outcry against the alleged awful destruction of fish in the
streams of Pennsylvania by herons.... A little later on, however, the
game commissioners found that the herons remaining in Pennsylvania
were far too few to constitute a pest to fish life, and furthermore,
the millinery interests appeared to be behind the movement. Under the
new law the milliners were enabled to reopen in Pennsylvania the sale
of aigrettes, because those feathers came from members of the
unprotected Heron Family! It required a tremendous State campaign to
restore protection to the herons and bar out the aigrettes; but it was
accomplished in 1912. Hereafter, let no man for one moment be deceived
by the claim that the very few-and-far-between herons, bitterns, and
kingfishers that now remain in the United States, anywhere, are such a
menace to fish life that those birds are a pest and deserve to be
shot. The inland streams of the United States and Canada lack fishes
because they have been outrageously overfished,--wastefully, wickedly
depleted, without sense or reason, by men who scorn the idea of
conservation. In Orleans County, New York, a case was reported to me
of a farmer who dynamited the waters of his own creek, in spawning
time!"
The Angler angles according to his own humanely conservative law. The
greedy fisherman fishes according to court or so-called legal law,
good or bad, and he always breaks the Angler's law and very often the
court's law.
In viewing Dr. Hornaday's Spokane photograph note the bait-casting
reel on the fly-casting rod--the rig of a clumsy as well as greedy
fisherman. The mess of trout shown is one that no Angler would ever
make and one that any gentleman would be ashamed of--"three times too
many fish for one rod," as Dr. Hornaday says, "another line of
extermination according to law." Of course, the Doctor means the
fisherman's law or the court's law, not the Angler's law.