In Defense of Fishing

Recently I’ve had some experiences that have gotten me thinking again about whether or not it’s acceptable to kill animals:  I took up fly fishing, and I read a couple of pieces by Michael Pollan, first an article called “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer” and then the book whence that article is adapted, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York, NY:  Penguin, 2006).  I’d like to articulate some of my thoughts on the matter here, for my own benefit if for no one else’s.  Among other things, I want to think about what role, if any, the gut-level inclinations to believe or assent to deontic or evaluative claim that some philosophers call “moral intuitions” really play in thinking about what to do, how to live, and what matters and how much (philosophers call this practical reasoning).  And in a more practical vein, I want to figure out whether or not I can keep up this new hobby in good conscience. 

There are lots of different kinds of animals and lots of different ways to kill them, but all I want to talk about here is doing the sort of thing I did the other day.  I went out to the Gunpowder River north of Baltimore and fished healthy populations of brown, brook, and rainbow trout with dry flies, or hooks made to look like flies that float on the top of the water and, if you’re lucky, trick the fish into thinking a tasty bug is floating over their heads.  As it happens I didn’t catch anything, but if I had, I would have killed the fish as quickly and painlessly as possible, and afterwards I would have eaten as much of the animal as I know how to make any use of.  Granted, this is a very particular case; if the truth be told, I suspect it has some wider ramifications, and I may say a bit more about these in a future post.  But as it has long seemed to me that the best way to make any headway in one’s thinking about ethical matters is to focus on the most specific cases one can, I want to begin with just this case.

So is there any reason to think it is not acceptable to do what I set out to do, to catch, kill, and eat a non-endangered species of trout in the ways I’ve described?

With the world’s population now over seven billion, one has to consider the possibility that it’s just not fair for any one person to eat an animal.  In general, one can coax a lot more meals out of the plants, insects, etc. that animals eat than from the animals themselves.[1]  This is why you find fewer and fewer organisms as you start going the higher up the food chain (e.g., there is a lot more clover on the earth than there are lions).  Given that this is so, it’s possible that there are so many people on the earth today that there is just not enough arable land to support the number of animals it would take for everyone on the earth to eat meat regularly or even at all; similarly in the case of ocean critters:  it’s possible that there are so many people on earth that there is just not enough ocean to support the numbers of sea critters there would need to be for everyone to eat seafood regularly.  I believe I read some time ago that we’ve already reached the point where this sort of situation obtains for relatively high frequencies of meat-eating and amounts of meat, like 1/2lb. meat per person per day.  But I’m not sure about this.  If anyone can point me toward hard data on this score I’d be interested to see it.  In any case, the relevant question for my purposes is just whether or not there are so many people on the planet that I can’t sustainably eat a wild brown, brook, or rainbow trout a few times a year.  I don’t know the answer to this question, so this is something I’ll have to look into.  But if there are, then I am happy to admit that I ought not to be eating these fish that often, since, I take it, there is nothing special about me that entitles me to take more than my approximately 1/7,000,000,000th of the world’s food.

Setting aside concerns about fairness to other people, though, are there any other reasons I ought not to have gone fishing?

One reason is that it may not be fair to the fish.  In killing an animal to eat it, we are requiring it to give up quite a bit.  If we have to do this in order that we might keep on living ourselves, then our demand seems fair and reasonable.  But if we don’t, then it’s no longer clear that this is so.  Given, then, that one can meet all of one’s nutritional requirements and feel great even if one never eats meat, or for that matter any animal product whatsoever, you might think worry that we are asking too much.  Is the sacrifice we require of the trout when we catch and kill it excessive?

That it is can seem obvious if we think of ourselves as inflicting considerable pain on a fish when we kill it and if we regard as the only reward that comes from killing and eating the fish the opportunity to eat a tasty meal.  It seems that a gustatory experience could ever be so good as to justify causing such suffering.  But I think this line of thought is mistaken:  the pain is less severe and the rewards more numerous than it supposes.

As for the pain, the amount of physical and psychological stress on a properly-caught and -dispatched fish during those processes is, to all appearances anyway, not really that much.  Ideally the hook goes through the fish’s lip rather than deeper in the throat or lower, and after getting several hooks stuck in my own fingers, I can tell you that that just can’t hurt that much.  For what it’s worth, I imagine that in the following passage, David James Duncan, author and fly fisherman, describes the experience of being caught on a fly more-or-less accurately (though I doubt trout are cognitively quite so sophisticated as the passage makes them out to be):

Deploying two troops of teeth, the trout clamped down viciously upon the ant….The trout crunched the ant again and again, but as it did so there came a whole bevy of bad businesses:  the trout was swimming down, but it was going up; this sort of thing should never happen.  And there was a pain in its mouth which its Racial Memory identified as toothache, a malady the poor trout had believed itself immune to.[2]

I take it that being reeled in is, as the passage suggests, more tiring and confusing than anything else:  mostly it just involves trying to swim away without making any headway.  And once one gets the fish reeled in, the idea is to kill it as quickly and efficiently as possible.  There are several ways to do this.  What seems best to me is to first hit it on the head with a piece of wood or a rock to stun it and then to use the method shown here.  I realize this may seem pretty gruesome, but in fact it makes for a death that is not only very quick but, compared to, say, being eaten alive by a raccoon or a bird right out of the water, presumably relatively painless as well.  If you don’t believe me, contrast that last video with this one of an eagle grabbing fish out of the water, and keep in mind that if the fish don’t suffocate before the bird begins to eat them, they will be eaten alive. 

As for the rewards of catching and eating trout, they are far more numerous than just a tasty meal, though that reward by itself is certainly not negligible.  Besides taste, there is to begin with the satisfaction of knowing exactly where the fish you plan to eat came from, at least roughly what kind of life it lived, how it was killed, and what its diet was like.  Information like this is hard to come by when you’re dealing with fish from the grocery store, and it can tell you quite a bit.  For instance, it can tell you something about the impact on the relevant ecosystem of harvesting the fish, about the quality of the fish’s life and death, and about its nutritional quality.  And that information can help you to make a more informed decision about whether or not it would be a good idea to eat the fish, from both an ethical and a nutritional standpoint.  Compared to eating a fish regarding which you know none of this sort of information, it is simply a delight to eat a fish that you know was sustainably harvested, lived a normal, healthy life, was killed humanely, and was not fed food fish ought not to eat or pumped full of antibiotics and hormones.  There’s also the sense of connection to and fundamental dependence on the land one gets by harvesting one’s own food, a sense hard to come by for city-dwellers like myself.  And of course there’s the fact that fish are food, and eating them makes it possible for us to continue living our own lives.

These are rewards of fishing that one can pretty easily appreciate even if one has never fished.  But there’s another reward of which that’s not true, or of which that at least was not true for me.  I have in mind the experience of being absolutely rapt, of being so engrossed in one’s surroundings that one ceases even to think, let alone to be aware of anything beyond the river, the rod, the fly, and the fish.  Pollan does a nice job of describing this experience of total mindfulness in the opening paragraph of his article “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer.”[3]  He’s talking there about hunting wild pigs, but if I understand him right, the experience is basically the same.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes, my ears roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Me fishing the Gunpowder.

This meditative state of heightened awareness I find remarkably relaxing, so much so that it, together with the incredible sense of calm that comes from spending a few hours on a serene and secluded river away from the hustle and bustle of city life, makes fishing one of the best ways to unwind I know.

Upon reflection, then, it seems to me hardly clear that what we have in this case is an unfair exchange, so I’m not convinced that I did anything wrong on this score.

There is, however, another set of considerations that suggests to me not that I ought not to have gone fishing, but that I need to be very careful about the way I go about it.  For it seems to me that even if there are no good environmental reasons to worry about killing trout, and even if the sacrifice an angler requires of the fish she catches and kills is not excessive, she might still be doing something reprehensible in catching, killing, and eating a trout.  This is because, from an ethical point of view anyway, it seems it also makes a difference both how one thinks and feels and what one says about killing and eating a trout and how one lives one’s life subsequently, so much so that these things can make the difference between a despicable and a venerable fisherman. 

I think the best way I can explain what I have in mind is by setting forth two very different ways of killing and eating a fish.

On the one hand, one might dispatch the fish clumsily and thoughtlessly, giving no thought to the fish’s discomfort.  One might regard the fish as basically an inanimate thing and killing a fish an act no more interesting from an ethical point of view than, say, chopping a log.  One might even make fun of the fish, thinking or saying how stupid it is because it can be fooled by artificial flies, many of which honestly don’t look too much like insects (consider this one).  And in either of these cases, one might later give no more thought to eating the fish than one might give to eating a French fry.

On the other hand, though, one might regard the catching and killing of the trout as a solemn affair and do so with a deep sense of respect for and gratitude to the fish, taking care throughout the process to be as kind as possible to it and to remain mindful of what one is putting it through.  One might thank the fish for giving up its life, as I understand Native Americans and other hunter-gatherers are wont to do,[4] and as Pollan himself did in a toast he reports in the following passage:

I passed the platters of chicken and corn and proposed a toast.  I offered thanks first to my hosts-cum-guests, then to Joel Salatin and his family for growing the food before us (and for giving it to us), and then finally to the chickens, who in one way or another had provided just about everything we were about to eat.  My secular version of grace, I suppose, acknowledging the various material and karmic debts incurred by this meal, debts which I felt more keenly than usual.[5]

One might even go so far as to make and keep promises to the fish to make as much use as possible of its body and to live out the rest of one’s life, which is made possible in part by the fish’s death, in such a way as to make its death worthwhile—say by helping to protect endangered trout habitat, or by achieving something noteworthy in the arts.  (The thought with this last promise being that not every kind of life is such that the fact that eating a fish would help to prolong it is a good reason to eat a fish.  Rather, I submit, this is true only of admirable lives.)

It seems to me plain that while something rankles in the former scenario, anyone who behaves in the way I describe in the latter is admirable.  Indeed, I’ll even go so far as to say that what we have in the former scenario approaches murder, while in the latter we have something more like a sacrament.  But why should it make so much of a difference to our evaluation of an angler’s act how he thinks, feels, and speaks about it and how he acts subsequently?

As for the angler’s thoughts and feelings, I should say I think that an angler can only be partly blamed for any inappropriate thoughts or feelings she may have while fishing, since it seems we are not totally in control of these aspects of our inner life.  Still, insofar as our thoughts and feelings about fish and fishing reflect our views on those topics (and, for what it’s worth, I take it this is so to a considerable extent), I think it does make sense to praise or blame people for their thoughts and feelings.  For our views are under our control, and some, like the view that trout deserve some respect and consideration from us, are better than others, like the view that they deserve none. 

As for the angler’s words, I think they make a difference because I believe that fish, as living things, have some degree of dignity, which we ought to respect, and because I think that one way we can do that is by saying appropriate things about and to them (by thanking them for their sacrifice, for instance). 

I think an angler’s subsequent actions matter for a different reason, a reason I’ll need to introduce some jargon to explain.  Suppose you make a promise to a friend and then fail to keep it for some good reason.  Suppose too that whatever kept you from fulfilling your promise came up so suddenly and was so urgent that it was impossible to contact your friend to let them know beforehand that you weren’t going to be able to keep your promise.  If you do something like this, it seems clear that you ought to do something to make it up to your friend.  At the very least, you ought to explain to them what happened.  Better, though, would be to get them a small gift and offer to do something for them.  However that may be, the important point is that some philosophers call this obligation to make it up to your friend that you incur when you break your promise a moral remainder or residue.[6]  In more general terms, we can say that a moral remainder or residue (at least as I understand the notion) is, roughly, an obligation (a) that one incurs when one does something (e.g., when one fails to keep a promise) and (b) whose fulfillment or lack thereof affects the moral status of that act in the performance of which it was incurred (thus, if you make it up to your friend later, your failure to keep your promise is as a result less blameworthy than it would have been otherwise).

Now, it seems to me that catching and killing a fish leaves an angler with a moral remainder, and I think that the reason an angler is admirable if she uses every part of the fish possible, thanks the fish for its sacrifice, and promises the fish to live out the rest of her life in such a way as to make its death count is that she thereby discharges that remainder.

These considerations I find persuasive enough that, for the time being anyway, I plan to keep fishing.  Now that I’ve reflected on what it must be like to be a fish that is humanely killed; on the many rewards of catching and eating wild trout; on the different ways one might think, feel, and talk about doing this sort of thing; and on the ways I might discharge the moral remainder with which one is left when one does so; I feel that it is at least possible to catch and eat trout in a way that I can not only live with, but in fact be proud of, at least if I’m right to think that I can do so without taking more than my fair share of the world's food. 

Of course there are lots of interesting further questions one could examine at this point and about which I certainly plan to think more in the future, and if I cannot come up with decent answers to them, I may still have to abandon this newfound hobby.  Why, for instance, ought we to believe fish have any degree of dignity or deserve respect?  And why should it be the case that performing certain acts should and others not leave one with a remainder to discharge?  Is there any principled way of dividing up the cases?  Do we need a principle?  But perhaps most troublesome, one might worry, as my fiancée Erika did when she read this, that while these considerations do seem to constitute a sufficient defense of my plan to catch, kill, and eat a trout, it seems clear that no analogous considerations could possibly justify murdering and eating a human being.  Why not?  Why should the species of the victim make such a difference here? 

These are all difficult questions answering which necessitates thinking considerably more deeply about a number of issues.  I think I may have a decent answer to at least the last one, and I might spell it out in a future post.  But this post seems to me long enough already, and a good start to a blog that I hope will allow me to share some of my thoughts with my friends and family and to discuss with anyone interested some issues I care about in a spirit of friendly inquiry.

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[1] An obvious exception is organisms like cows and other ruminants that can eat things humans can’t digest (grass, for instance).  I may consider the (non-obvious) moral implications of this fact in a future post.

[2] From The River Why, twentieth-anniversary edition, (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1983), p. 197.

[3] This paragraph is also in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 334.

[4] The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 331.

[5] The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 271.

[6] While I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that others speak this way too, I’m familiar with these terms only from Rosalind Hursthouse’s book On Virtue Ethics (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 199), pp. 71-77.