Environmentalism and Angling--Cleaning Trout to Cook Them

 I went back to the AT&T bridges at sundown and had the river to myself; it was as if people feared rain, and clouds billowed low. All to myself, the last of five rainbows took a while to catch. I quickly caught four, then went downstream to fish fast water that changed since I last drifted eggs through. I needed waders, so I went back to slow water and must have missed a dozen hits before I caught the fifth. I released the decent 11 1/2-incher--a fighting fish on a three-and-a-half foot rod so light I can almost tie it in a knot, outfitted with two-pound test--and then I walked out with two of the earlier I had tossed up on the grass. Not all the trout took the eggs lightly, but most of them seemed to just slightly tug the salmon eggs off the hook as they usually do.

To write a blog post on environmentalism and angling, I cannot hope to come close to being exhaustive. Suffice it to say I will relate ideas in future posts as well.

It is so ironic to come home with a couple of trout, clean them with no complications within a minute's time, wash the fillets in the sink, place them directly in the frying pan, and to know and experience that this behavior is truly environmental, satisfies to the depths, and yet that we anglers are being harrangued by radical environmentalist "animal rights" professors who claim that to do this is morally evil!

We eat. And to produce your own food with such skill--very few anglers can clean a brace of trout in less than a minute and have them in the pan the next--unifies the spirit with reality rather than complicates it with divisions. To be lost in complications, divisions--that is what evil is.

Read one of those professor's books and see how the intent seems to be to do just that to you.