I catch and eat a lot of fish, I like fish, my family likes fish, and I like to catch fish. I like to bring some home too, just feels good to process it all and put it away. I hunt also, I even catch and process all my herring. We pretty much only eat meat that I shot, caught, or raised on the farm - my wife and I were raised that way and that's what we do.

Now the good thing about all this is that I can also be very selective about what I keep, and if I don't want to mess with it I can release everything. Hell, that's what I've been doing since September anyway - my freezer is too full.

Now I did keep a few Chehalis silvers that I know were wild fish - but this year the Chehalis has a healthy wild run so I don't feel bad about it. I would feel bad about keeping wild fish on a river where the runs were questionable, and I never keep wild steelhead, period - In my opinion there is no wild run of steelhead that can take any exploitation beyond the stress caused by catch and release, plus there is the likelihood that if you release that fish you will catch it again (I caught the same 12 pound hen 3 times in one day on the Queets once), and the possibility that it will return to spawn again and again (I believe the record is 7 times for a fish from the Toutle).

The fact that salmon always die after spawning, and that they really only agressively bite until they are done feeding, are good reasons not to feel too bad about keeping one on a river where they are not in trouble. Steelhead, on the other hand, return way more to everyone when left in the river - they bite aggressively and repeatedly even after they have spawned. For the sake of continued good fishing in your favorite river, release the nates carefully and always.