HOOK, LINE AND THINKER, ANGLING & ETHICS BY ALEXANDER SCHWAB
Price: £ 17.99 Hardback, 224 pages, ISBN 1873674 59 7
To be published 17 April 2003 by Merlin Unwin Books

The anti-fieldsports lobby has led the debate on hunting, fishing and shooting for the last decade. ‘Hook, Line and Thinker’ is a book which turns the tables on the antis and takes a fresh look at the assumptions which many now accept as facts.

Alexander Schwab, The author of ‘Hook, Line and Thinker’, grew up in Switzerland and gained a Masters Degree in philosophy and history at Aberdeen university. He now lives in the beautiful Emmental region of Switzerland and fills the gaps between fishing trips by working as a management consultant.

He is author and photographer of a widely acclaimed book on Lake Thun, which is his local fishing ground. His hobbies include mushrooming, cooking, exploring the countryside and reading poetry.

In the book, Alexander asks:

  • What is meant by cruelty?
  • How do you measure pain?
  • Who says man is an animal and that all animals are equal? Is man a fish without scales or is he something different?
  • If catching and releasing a fish is cruel, then how cruel is eating one?
  • When fieldsports have been banned, will we be asked to become vegetarians too?
  • Where does religion fit in with fieldsports?
  • How can one justify keeping a pet cat which tortures before it kills?

Here is a book which tackles these issues from the philosophical viewpoint. It examines the ethics of the anti-fieldsports lobby and takes their arguments back to their roots.

The conclusions expose the precarious philosophical ground of the anti-fieldsports lobby. It is they who should be on the run.

Those who read this book, when asked to justify their ‘cruel’ pastime, will know to ask the challengers to justify their grounds for attempting to ban it. And to pick them up on their answers.

FISHINGmagic VERDICT

This is a thinking man’s book, for those anglers who know instinctively that fishing is as natural as breathing, who know instinctively that fishing is not cruel but are unable to express why they feel that way.

This book will help you to understand why you fish (apart from the pleasure you get from doing so) and will help enormously when you have to counter the arguments of the antis.

One of my favourite passages from the book is:

Anti-anglers are, as we have seen, not really interested in fish at all. Anglers are, and that is why there are still fish in rivers and lakes. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with questions of beauty in nature and art and how beauty affects us. A pike is a beautiful being. Fishing for pike thus could be the quest for beauty.

One of the pleasures of angling is the hope of experiencing something extraordinary, something beautiful, something sublime. Rod and line are, in Wordsworth’s words, the

True symbol of the foolishness of hope,
Which with it’s strong enchantment led us on
By rocks and pools, shut out from every star
All the green summer, to forlorn cascades
Among the windings of the mountain brooks
Unfailing recollections! …

This is the romantic version. And there is also the match fisher’s hope for success on the big day. All anglers are looking for something – beauty of some sort. All fishing has this aspect in it which has to be cultivated in order to raise the standard of the sport and its overall acceptance. Much has been done in terms of educating young anglers, and – more still needs to be done. First and foremost the ditches between the different types of angling have to be filled. Remember: if one type of angling is wrong, so are all the others!

But that’s enough from me for some of my writings have been quoted extensively in the book and I can do nothing but heap praise on it.

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