Before I get into that a bit of background. Yes, this is a
Foundation that is Conservative with a capital C with most of the founders
and patrons being MPs, MEPs, Lords, activists or spouses of the
aforementioned, all mostly connected in some way to the Conservative Party.
It is an aside and I could well be wrong, but I didn’t notice much
crossover with the All-Party groups associated with rivers and angling.
However, the Foundation itself did not write the report,
preferring to commission the Fish Welfare Initiative, who hardly seem the
best of choices. To start with the Fish Welfare Initiative don’t seem to be
actually based in the UK. Any physical address is absent from their web
site, the only clue to their whereabouts being adverts for interns and
staff, the posts based in India and Asia respectively. Of the sixteen
people listed as staff or advisors only two are based in the UK, with half
either in the US or India.
Now to be scrupulously fair one of the two people who wrote
the report is one of Fish Welfare’s British contingent, a chap called Tom
Billington who is Director of Research, a grand title for someone who
appears to only be in his 20’s and holds no apparent scientific credentials
beyond degree in philosophy from Southampton University. As I say, I am
being fair so I will add that his co-author is Jennifer-Justine Kirsch from
Germany does hold a degree in environmental sciences and marine
conservation but again is in her 20’s and, if her Facebook page is anything
to go by, motivated by the environmentalism movement. But neither appears
to be a professional in the field of which they write or be attached to an
accredited institution.
I am not expert enough to comment on all 40 pages of the
report; large parts of it are way out of my areas of expertise so I can
only judge by the bit I know about which is covered in the Hobbyist, Recreation, and Experimentation section. The first half of the opening
paragraph reads:
“It is also worth noting that fish welfare issues are not
confined to the food sector. There are also considerations to be made as to
fishes used in other sectors, as well as for recreational purposes. In
recreational fishing, fish suffer from hook injuries, stress, and crowding
when stored in buckets. Although no official statistics have been obtained,
it is unlikely that every angler properly stuns the fish they catch to eat,
meaning that fish may still be conscious while asphyxiating or being
gutted.”
The bucket reference I find a bit head scratching; my
reading of the Environment Agency rules suggests this would be illegal. As
for the second point on gutting,this is highly tendentious extrapolating a
point view without any supporting evidence. However, it is really the
second half of the paragraph that is strewn with false information.
“Catch and release activities are also stressful for the
fish and even when released back into the wild survival rates can be
dramatically low. Some researchers suggest a survival rate of only 1-2% for
released fish and up to 50% for crustaceans, while others suggest a mean
survival of 18%. Regardless of what the exact survival rate is, from a
welfare perspective catch and release remains a highly stressful event for
fish from which they recover only slowly if they recover at all.”
So, if we take the Fish Welfare in the UK report at
its word, the death rate of released fish is somewhere from 99% to 82%.
Really? I am not going to recite here all evidence, both scientific and
anecdotal that counters this, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of
recreational fishing would know this to be utter nonsense. Carp lakes are
not strewn with the dead. Trout streams bobbing with fish corpses. Or canals
death zones. However, the authors in citing data that is clearly wrong,
have been drawn to make to an emotive and inaccurate conclusion that would
anger me if I was unaware of the true facts of fish mortality.
However, the real tragedy of this report is not the
inaccuracy of the report – we all make mistakes – but the fact that it ever
saw the light of day and is now out there in the public domain with many
high-profile supporters who may give it credibility it does not
deserve. Hopefully it will die a death. Perhaps it is equally
inaccurate in other parts. But at least we know enough to shoot it down as
regards our particular sphere of interest.
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