In its crudest form, extremism is the blind obedience to a cause: violence, arson, murder and the rest are all legitimate weapons in the achievement of an objective. The hunt saboteurs fall into this category. They have in the past carried out quite severe physical attacks on anglers and disrupted fishing matches. Many of them have landed in prison for violent crimes.
Extremism is also the mental ability to ignore completely any argument which tends to suggest that the extremist’s way of thinking is wrong. Animal rights organisations have a long history of such blinkered, twisted thinking. They put animals before humans on all issues. I have seen literature produced by ultra-animal lib fanatics which claims that cancer is a myth, a disease invented by doctors so that they would have an excuse to perform sadistic experiments and medication trials on animals.
The RSPCA’s long-standing anti-angling agenda is well-known. Its high-handed, military-style raids on pet owners, as well as its controversial access to the Police computer, have made it a subject of media attention in recent years. The latest developments, and specifically elections for posts on its ruling council, now threaten to make it into some kind of animal liberation organisation which has been taken over by extremists, rather than just one which exists in a totally legitimate way to combat animal cruelty.
The RSPCA, which has an annual income of £125m, is now headed by Peta Watson-Smith, herself a vegan, who appears committed to encouraging the UK population to follow a wholly plant-based diet; she has compared farming to the Holocaust. On the Board of the RSPCA we can find one Dan Lyons, of the ‘Centre for Animals and Social Justice’, a kind of think-tank on animal issues and also a charity with an income of £100k per annum. One of the issues it appears to have considered is that of reserving seats in Parliament specifically for the representation of the interests of animals.
The RSPCA, true to its current form, has called for a boycott of dairy farmers in badger-cull areas. I know this is a contentious issue, but this style of response (as opposed to reasoned debate) is becoming more common. In fact, using this ‘Mafia’ approach, unspecified animal rights activists have succeeded in persuading Caffe Nero not to buy milk from badger cull areas. This of course opens the way for supermarkets to be targeted. What next?
A candidate, who was in fact not elected, in recent RSPCA elections was John Bryant, the author of ‘Fettered Kingdoms’, a work on the rights of animals and fish. Bryant considers that keeping a pet is tantamount to being a slave-owner. He says that: ‘we should cut the domestic cat free.’ More importantly, he also says that: ‘the right of every single fish to live out its life as nature intended is an animal rights issue.’
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organisation which goes in for large-scale, very expensive, and rather soppy campaigns designed to appeal to the emotions: against hunting, shooting and fishing, both commercial and recreational. We can take it as read that they are all vegetarians, if not vegans. I have personally seen a giant hoarding advertisement showing a silhouette image of men with long fishing rods and poles sticking out of their groins. The caption suggests that men only fish to compensate for their lack of manhood.
Dawn Carr, PETA’s specialist project manager who campaigns against commercial and recreational fishing, recently wrote a letter to the National Marine Aquarium criticising it for serving fish and chips in the aquarium café, referring to: ‘seafood…made from living sea animals who treasured life and were needlessly subjected to pain and fear.’ PETA propaganda has been known to refer to marine fish as ‘sea kittens’. Significantly for us, PETA also preaches that recreational fishing is totally at odds with fish welfare.
Tempting as it is to do so, we should not just laugh and write off PETA, or any other such organisation, as a bunch of loonies and ignore their activities completely. PETA raises huge sums of money for their campaigns; every year they send UK householders ‘surveys’, designed to raise money and recruit members. This material concentrates on animal welfare and cruelty, and is predictably accompanied by the most graphic and appalling images they can find.
They have been known to have been successful in persuading primary schools to let them hand out anti-angling T-shirts. They are not going to go away in a hurry.
I happen to believe, and I am not alone in this, that hunting and fishing, done responsibly, have a positive influence on the environment. There are vast areas of Africa and elsewhere which are fenced off, defended and reserved for hunting. Without a doubt, a vested interest in species which are hunted assists in the preservation of those species. Without the hunting factor and the protection it brings to species, animals would be mercilessly poached and indiscriminately killed for meat. There are significant areas of the Scottish Highlands where the hunting of deer has been stopped, where now no vegetation of significance grows, as the numerous deer scoff anything which tries to grow. Hunting them can therefore be a valid form of environmental management.
Needless to say, under the heading of responsible hunting I definitely do not include trophy-obsessed individuals out to shoot semi-tame lions or whatever, or the indiscriminate gunning down of migrating songbirds just for fun.
Raising game birds for the gun may seem at first sight to be an activity which would have a negative impact on the environment. It seems beyond doubt that there have been criminal persecutions and shootings of birds of prey by unscrupulous keepers. But I believe the reality is that, were it not for the presence of game birds, those birds of prey would never have thrived in the first place. I certainly do not subscribe to the view that such shooting is simply a destructive activity.
The same principle applies to fish. It is a huge error to believe that fish and indeed the whole environment would be better preserved without angling. But quite a lot of the general public believe that to be true, simply because it seems obvious to them. Fishing is in reality however an example of a vested interest, one which asks questions and rectifies the situation when species are under threat, and which takes action when waters are polluted or over-abstracted, or subject to extreme predation.
Would not such action also be to boycott decades of research into the conservation of rare species?
I happen to have been involved recently in the creation of a fishery from a neglected, overgrown and shallow pond; the place, which incidentally would be a sitting target for fly-tipping if no anglers were around, is now a purpose-made, managed and stocked fishery for true crucian carp, a species which has become ever rarer in recent years. The place is now being fished regularly. And members of the angling club concerned are acting as practical environmental managers. The other day I was gratified to see a heron overhead taking an interest. Kingfishers may well follow later…
I repeat, the worst response we can make as anglers is simply to ignore the likes of the RSPCA, PETA and other antis. Their (usually emotionally-based) propaganda is more and more likely to be swallowed unquestioningly by a population which is becoming increasingly urbanised and knows little of the countryside, fishing or other field sports.
In the uninformed public mind, fishing for a creature, or hunting it, can only be harmful to the species concerned. We need therefore to support the work of the Angling Trust in maintaining and strengthening our own PR effort at national level – not in order to convert the extremists: that will never happen – but to educate the general public about our sport, so that they know what we are about. So that they might want to give it a try themselves and so that parents will not recoil in horror when their children take an interest in it.
And last not least, so that politicians can be properly informed and got on side when we fight our numerous campaigns.
The Angling Trust deserves your support in its dealings with politicians and the media to defend and promote fishing. Find out all about the Angling Trust and its work at www.anglingtrust.net or call us on 01568 620447. If you’re not already a member DO consider joining.
*Rod began fishing in his local park lake at the age of twelve, and from there he graduated to chub and roach from the river Tees in North Yorkshire. He now lives in Surrey within striking distance of the river Mole, as well as the Medway and the Eden in Kent and does a lot of surface carp fishing on small waters in the area. Latterly he has enjoyed winter fishing on the Test in Hampshire. He has contributed numerous articles on various angling subjects and personalities to ‘Waterlog’ magazine, as well as many posts on environmental and political subjects in support of the work of the Angling Trust on the ‘Fishing Magic’ website (www.fishingmagic.com)
He remains a passionate angler as well as a member and promoter of the Angling Trust
