It still puzzles me as to why anyone with a modicum of intelligence, which I take it, most people educated in the UK must have, would want to drop their litter anywhere they please without any due consideration for the environment they live in and yet far too many still do.
By saying “far too many” I’m not insinuating that most people do, just that it’s far too many for my liking and one person can be considered to be far too many in this circumstance. What do we call the “environment”? Well, just about anywhere you care to name, their streets, their play areas (as with kids), their places of work even, and the open spaces around them, woods, fields, country paths, and as far as we here are concerned, their fisheries!
Because they’re our fisheries too and most fisheries are managed by clubs that are run by unpaid volunteers who do the job with no thanks, most of the time, from the membership and yet are expected to clean up the venues after every litterlout in the club has been enjoying a day’s fishing and spreading their left-over rubbish around the swims.
It’s perhaps just a very small percentage of anglers that are litterlouts, but how they manage to spread so much litter in so many swims at so many venues in such a short time beggars belief.
It’s not just anglers, as I said, these people come from all walks of life and as if to prove it, our woodlands preservation society organised a Spring Clean-Up a couple of weeks ago. By 12 noon, many of us had collected at least a sack full of empty plastic bottles, booze tins, crisp packets, Mars (and other) wrappers, and tissues (do people think these just disappear when they’ve blown their schnozzles into them and discarded them?) By 9 at night I took the dog for a walk and would you belieeeeve it (sounding like Meldrew again), I had to pick up a snack bag of ‘cheese and onion somethings that Mr Dorkbrain had finished and chucked on our newly cleaned path… Nine hours is all it took.
But it’s fisheries we’re interested in. What do you think the landowners think when they walk around the lake or river they’ve licensed out to a club and find all of this litter around? What are the chances that he’s a little bit miffed and may not renew that licence next year thereby preventing many a good and decent angler who cares, from ever fishing his venue again?
I am fast coming to the conclusion that the human race (in this country at least) is splitting in two, there will be those honest decent folk who strive to hold down a job, provide for their families, and look after their neighbourhood and the environment. And then there are the others, the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ guests (not all on there are bad, mind), the ones who live on benefit and have no intention of working, waste their money on fags, booze and drugs, and leave the remnants of these habits lying in our countryside.
Yes, perhaps I’m generalizing now and not all people on benefit are on drugs and not everyone who smokes leaves litter, but I am talking about a particular culture within our society and the word “culture” defines what is after all a generalization. I am convinced that there is, somewhere amongst some people, a fault in the gene pool and if allowed to spread could lead to the development of a separate sub-specie of human being.
This new specie will need all the help it can get, to be cared for from cradle to grave will not be enough. It will need to be spoon fed and have it bottom wiped for it. It might also have to be trapped and caged to stop it from harming itself, but most of all, prevent it from harming the rest of us and our surroundings. Perhaps they could become another exhibit in zoos where at least keepers, who are used to dealing with mucky animals, are paid for cleaning up the cages and taking care of them.
We must come up with a new scientific name for this sub-specie, I thought of “homo-slobidus”, but you invent some of your own.
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| My prize Shimano from Angler’s Mail has served me well over the years |
Mind you, I’ve done well out of these scumbags in the past having written about litter once to Angler’s Mail and I won letter of the week and a Shimano 4000 reel for my effort. I’d rather have seen all the litter disappear though and for the message to get through to every litterlout in the country so it never happens again, but that will have to remain a dream for now. I don’t think anything will change within my lifetime, but we have to get the message through to these people –
Take it home! It weighs less when it’s empty and you carried it there, so carry it back again! Simple!
(There’s a thought, would Comparethemarket.com allow a Government campaign to use those loveable meerkat puppets to get through to these people? It something that generally works better when you can use a character that is popular, and real meerkats do demand a clean environment. I complained recently because a £920m campaign to try and reduce the number of teenage pregnancies had failed its target miserably and how better to have used that money to reduce the amount of litter. Then again, perhaps the people getting girls pregnant are the very same ones distributing litter thereby defeating the object.)
Dream on, but we proud, decent, and caring anglers can do something. We can contact our club officials and ask when there is a work party on our venues and go along and help clean up, I’m sure they will appreciate that enormously. We can even maintain the cleanliness of our fisheries by removing immediately any waste that these retards have left on a previous outing, if it can’t be bagged straight away, at least gather it together for bagging up before you leave.
We can also demand that our club institute a rule, if they don’t already have one (which they most likely do), and enforce it that anyone seen or found discarding litter is immediately banned from the club for life, their ticket confiscated and other clubs in the area notified to prevent them moving on. That’s why I’m a great believer in associations of clubs, they can work together to stamp out this disgraceful conduct. If we have to put up with it in our streets, parks, and countryside, we should NOT have to put up with it at our fisheries!
That’s Zero Tolerance!
