Pretty funny stuff from Ron Judd / Times staff columnist
Can a fish feel pain? How about fishermen?
Do fish really feel pain?
Man, I like to think so.
It would be just desserts, in fact, for all the turmoil they've put some of us through over the years.
Last week's controversial insistence by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (is a fish now an animal, as well?) that fish do, indeed, feel pain was welcome news at the Judd home in Escrow Heights, where the garage is filled with various implements of fish torture and, it can be hoped, eventual fish demise.
As I sat listening to various midday AM radio gasbags (again, pardon the redundancy) pontificate on the matter, a sea of old memories came washing over me, tickling the soul like some unscratchable itch deep down one leg of my old green hip waders:
• A time on the Kasilof River in Alaska when, in the process of playing a fine coho salmon not four feet from my toes, one of his cohorts — and this is true — leapt from the water, slammed into my leader, and sent both fish scurrying free to proceed up the river.
• A morning on the Skykomish River when a steelhead — the first I had ever brought to the bank — flopped out of my hand, splatted once on a rock, and went right back in the river, leaving me to curse, shudder, spit, step backward on a patch of moss, and fall, like a mass of neoprene-encased angst, straight on my batoosky in front of 50 other people.
Did each of those fish, not to mention the countless others that have foiled me over the years, feel serious pain as we did battle on the shoreline?
The mere possibility brings a gleam to my eyes.
This pain thing is a wonderful development all on its own. But I fear people are missing out on all its logical extensions and ultimate applications.
If a fish can feel pain, I like to imagine that it also can feel a wide range of emotions: glee, envy, anger, pathos, torpor, shame, embarrassment and, without a doubt, ennui — the latter a logical byproduct of milling around for months on end in schools of identical brothers and sisters, with absolutely nowhere to go on Friday nights.
This opens up an entire new world of opportunity for lifelong fish combatants: psychological warfare.
The next time I hook a trout, salmon, steelhead or other game fish that I cannot, either for reasons of conscience or fear of a big fine for out-of-season harvest, take home and consume with some dill weed and chardonnay, I plan to get my licks in my own special way: playing on the fish's emotional insecurities.
"Nice fight," I might scoff at the weary wild chinook before releasing it safely back into the water. "Was that really the best you've got?"
"Welcome to shore, Bucko!" I will jest at my next landed wild steelhead. "I can see how you'd think this collection of wire, plastic beads and yarn looks enough like food to risk your life. Could happen to anybody!"
"Those vertical stripes would look really nice against the horizontal bars of my smoker," I might casually mention to a beached chum salmon. "You're not going there today — but you might be tomorrow."
And so on.
Some people might call this mental warfare cruel, sadistic or just sad, and they're probably partially right.
I call it justice, and a big relief: If it really turns out that the few fish I've managed to beach in my life feel some fraction of the pain, humiliation and embarrassment I've endured pursuing them, there is a modicum of fairness in the natural order after all.
I know all my friends at PETA will be stunned by this position. I know each and every one of them pursues a noble goal, and that someday, a few of them might actually figure out exactly what that is.
But the truth is, they are badly overestimating the human species in all this.
A PETA spokesperson just last week said, for example, that they plan to win over the world by asking simple, heartfelt questions, such as: You wouldn't go out and hook and eat your pet, would you?
I suspect the rest of the sane world would answer a lot like me:
Well, no.
On the other hand, given a chance to set a treble hook into the neighbor's shar-pei that keeps pooping in my yard, I'd take it in half a second.
It's not easy being the top link in the food chain. But somebody's gotta do it.
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