A letter to fisheries magazine

18 April 2012

Fisheries Magazine
American Fisheries Society
5410 Grosvenor Lane, Suite 110
Bethesda, MD 20814-2199

Dear Editors,

I am a member of AFS. I’ve fished commercially, I’ve worked with tilapia in Kerala, India, and Atlantic salmon in Maine and New Brunswick, I’ve written books and booklets about fishes. I’ve been around the world a dozen or so times, on projects involving aquaculture. I’m in my ninetieth year. I tell you all this because I think I now have a perspective that I could not have achieved fifty years previous.

Simply put, the feature article in Fisheries, April, 2012, by some very articulate people regarding anti-angling are, I opine, opening a floodgate leading down a very slippery slope. Some of the authors quoted in the article offer a warped agenda that would eventually have all the world eat nothing but tofu, tree bark and perhaps some creatures that die of old age. Then we humans will be politically correct and morally beyond reproach. We will also be dead from a thousand cuts.

Where does one draw the line?

Have any readers of Fisheries ever seen a mimosa plant? Surely it is very sensitive, the dictionary tells us so. This same dictionary tells us that tofu (mentioned above) is the product of the soy bean, a legume related to the mimosa – that very sensitive plant. Of course everyone is entitled to free speech but somehow I wonder whether the rest of us members of AFS should foot the bill for all that paper and all that postage and all that ink; ink that was perhaps made with inhumanely harvested fish oil or soy bean oil, made from the living seeds of a plant that may be very, very sensitive.

Sincerely,

Mervin F. Roberts