The image of the angler peacefully enjoying the tranquillity of the river-bank, appreciative of aquatic wildlife, waiting patiently for a fish to take the bait, but as content to return home without a ‘bite’, is fading fast.

I confess never to have understood the fascination of fishing.  When I was a boy my father took me out on a mackerel-fishing trip off the Dorset coast.  It might have been the beginning of a lifetime as an angler if the boatman had not thrown the only fish I caught into a basket - still alive.  I sat horrified with tears in my eyes as I watched its interminable death-throes, too shy to tip it back into the sea or even to ask someone to put it out of its misery.

Since that time I have considered fishing to be cruel, but until recently have never quite placed anglers to be in the same camp as fox hunters, stag hunters, hare coursers and game shooters.  While walking in the countryside, if I came across someone fishing, I might nod and mutter ‘Morning’, whereas I could never disguise my contempt for hunting with dogs or guns.  That’s all changed now.

In 2005 the National Federation of Anglers demanded licences to kill up to 3,000 cormorants a year because the birds had the cheek to catch fish to eat – fish which cormorants need to eat for survival, but which anglers catch for amusement and normally don’t intend to eat at all!   The Labour government, these days as eager as the Tories to court the shootin’ and fishin’ lobby, caved in and granted the licences – much to the consternation of conservation bodies.  Labour MP, Martin Salter, claimed that cormorant numbers had increased by 70 per cent since 1989 and that they “eat so many fish that they threaten other predators such as herons”, an allegation for which I have been unable to discover the slightest evidence.

In my local Countryside Park earlier this year, the usual notices were erected announcing the ‘Fresh Water Close Season’ from 15^th March to the 15^th June and threatening a potential fine of £2,500 for transgressors.  The Close Season is for the purpose of allowing fish to spawn, and is a clear recognition that impaling fish on metal hooks, is not exactly conducive to their reproduction.  When I visited the park in April however, there were still dozens of anglers sat in their little green tents, each with two or three unattended rods protruding into the lake.  I discovered that the local angling club had negotiated a deal in which the close season would only apply to the nearby river, leaving anglers free to continue fishing in the lake, whereas the year before, the close season applied to both.

What amazes me about this addiction to fishing is that one can see anglers arriving in the car park, with literally thousands of pounds worth of equipment - rods, bait, chairs, stoves, alarms, radios, tents and keep-nets, all loaded onto special trailers or wheel-barrows to be wheeled out to the lake and assembled by fishermen totally clothed in camouflage outfits appropriate for some dangerous war-theatre – all to outwit and capture an animal with a brain less than the size of a moth-ball!  

Angling is still portrayed as an uncontroversial and worthwhile activity and increasingly encouraged amongst children perhaps as a way of keeping kids off the streets and channelling their energies into persecuting fish rather than local residents.  News from East Anglia, however, illustrates that anglers are becoming less jealous of that reputation.  The Eastern Daily Press, April 15^tth 2009, reported that anglers are complaining about otters, by far Britain’s most favourite wild animals, now reviving in numbers since becoming a protected species in 1978.  The anglers in the area are demanding that the government (i.e. tax-payers!) provides funds to erect fences to stop otters eating fish which anglers want to catch for sport.   One fishing writer, Ian Chillcott, goes further and is already calling for a cull of what he describes as these ‘little murdering blighters’ and Richard Lee, editor of Angling Times admits that illegal killing of otters by anglers has already started.

On May 29^th 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that three families of beavers from Norway were to be be released in Scotland – the first official reintroduction of the mammal in Britain since it was exterminated by hunters 400 years ago.  A cause for celebration?  Not for anglers!  Led by bloodsports enthusiasts Sir Ian Botham and Fiona Armstrong former ITN newsreader, and Robin Malcolm, chief of the Clan MacCallum, (who describes beavers as “destructive, nocturnal rats”),  have condemned the scheme formulated by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Royal Zoological Society for Scotland and the Forestry Commission as “recklessly irresponsible”.  Botham and his pals claim that the beavers could “devastate the angling industry” despite the fact that beavers are exclusively herbivorous!

Fox hunting and shooting enthusiast David Cameron has promised that a Conservative government will lift the 36 year-old protection of badgers and restore legality to fox hunting, hare coursing and stag hunting with dogs, bloodsports banned by Labour in 2005.   There are also increasing numbers of wild boar in some parts of England which at present can be shot, but upon which some extreme hunters would love to unleash the hounds.   With anglers now labelling cormorants, otters and even beavers as ‘vermin’ and the hunting lobby eager to legally unleash up to 50,000 hounds, terriers, greyhounds and lurchers onto foxes, hares, mink and deer,  it is clear that the election of a Conservative government will be a disaster for British wildlife. David Cameron’s so-called ‘compassionate conservatism’ will rapidly descend into  something more akin to ‘medieval barbarism’.