This is a copy of the letter I sent to AT this afternoon
<b>?Now its time to shut your mouth?</b>
Bob Nudd?.Are you on drugs?
Having just read ?Bobs? piece in the Sunday papers, I have to admit to being totally bewildered by his logic and sense of timing. ?There are too many pike and they need culling? said Bob. Sorry Bob but that is a flawed argument. I don?t care about how many fish you had snatched off the hook whilst you fished the Warwickshire Avon, the Nene or the Soar.
We are in the midst of a war, a war that is being fought on several fronts against some seriously dangerous opposition. One of the major battles in this war is the re-education of Eastern European and Asian immigrants into the ethics of angling UK style. We the British anglers are trying to point out (in several different languages and until we are blue in the face and not always with the backing one would expect from the EA) that in this country we fish mainly for sport and not for the pot.
We value fish too highly to catch them once is an ethic I believe started in the USA with catch and release and has been adopted pretty much across the board in the UK as well. The UK is a small Island that now has a population of over 60,000,000 and if we allow every Tom **** and Ahmed to take fish for the pot then our extremely finite resources will soon be seriously depleted and so it is of great importance that this message is struck home and understood.
So it is with utter incredulity I found myself reading Bob ramblings where he praises the reemergence of the silverfish but at the same time declares war on the predators, I hope Bob reads this?.Bob, rivers are natural waterways with a natural balance of species the only time this balance is thrown out is when we interfere with it! How can we say to Mr. X from Poland/Lithuania/Iraq/Congo that he cannot take a fish for the pot when you, one of our highest ambassadors and greatest exponents want to cull fish simply to improve your sport?
If you think that a cull will improve your sport you are wildly wide of the mark, it will not make an iota of difference excepting maybe encouraging even more small pike and probably zander into the bio-masse of the rivers in question. The best control of small pike are big pike, remove those and we have disease issues and stunting to worry about, so do us all a favour and don?t meddle in things you cannot control.
If you still want predator free fishing where you are not getting ?snatched?, go back onto the commercial pools and play with the manmade F1?s and leave the real fishing to real anglers who understand the bigger picture and the real issues.
Lee Swords