One of the first assaults on fishing took place two years ago, when Dawn Carr and Gill the Fish, her piscatorial partner, visited dozens of schools around the country. "Only one school let us in," reported Carr, anti-fishing campaign coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Undeterred, she and Gill, the 6-foot-tall, costumed fish mascot, stationed themselves just beyond school property. There, they passed out literature and told kids about the evils of fishing.
    Gill let Carr do the talking. Their slogan: Look, don't hook.Last March, declaring fishing "the final frontier of animal rights," PETA sent out a news release announcing plans to dump large amounts of sedatives into Texas' Lake Palestine. The goal: ruin a fishing tournament scheduled for April 1, 2000. Several newspapers ran stories about the threat, missing the fact that the release included such names as April Phule and Jo Kizonu. No joke. Now anti-fishing activists are gearing up for a third year of protest. Public statements by some PETA leaders suggest that their tactics will become more confrontive, following the example such overseas counterparts as Pisces, the British Campaign for the Abolition of Angling. In Britain and Germany, anti-angling protesters have thrown rocks into popular fishing waters and sent scuba divers to spook the fish. Silly, you say? Sure, but effective. Protests have already produced fishing bans on a number of lakes and streams in Germany and Britain.

     Instinctively, most anglers dismiss such tactics. "Don't rise to the bait," they say, "don't give these people the attention they crave." But as PETA thrusts its aggressive campaign into schools, as it discolors the public image of all anglers, as it attracts media attention anyway, we no longer have the luxury of turning away.
    It's time for an angler's manifesto. Here's the best way to view PETA's attack on anglers. Use their threat to galvanize the energy and organization we need in order to fight the larger and more important environmental and social forces: commercial over-fishing, watershed destruction, pollution, urban sprawl, and an unnatural infatuation with electronic reality. Unchecked, these trends will deplete resources and diminish natural experience. Evidence of deterioration already exists: Despite recent growth, the upswing in fishing has flattened. Sales of fishing licenses lag behind population growth -- particularly among young people No wonder PETA is moving in for the kill; it senses vulnerability. -- Fishing saves fish.
    Next time someone attacks fishing, ask them: If fishing were outlawed tomorrow, what would be the fate of our watersheds? Who watches the lakes and streams, particularly the hidden branches of lost canyons and forgotten slopes, more closely than anglers? Who knows those waters better? The protection that anglers offer our waters results not from looking at but from participating in nature.
    "A persistent error of many of my (anti-angling) students is to claim that they do not 'intervene' in nature," says Michael LaChat, professor of Christian Ethics at the Methodist Theological School of Delaware. "But their shoes, cars, houses, pets, children and even their vegetarian preferences directly and indirectly cause the death of animals. If we have an obligation to future generations for
ensuring biodiversity and ecological well-being, then surely we ought to be active managers of fisheries, too. Humans are part of the natural order. By omission or commission, we are predators
as well as conservers."

    As a result of our attachment to fishing, he maintains, anglers have a symbiotic relationship with fish.We share incentives to be their stewards, to protect their watersheds and prevent pollution. In fact, no group can match anglers' active concern for fish habitat. For example, two fishing-related laws, the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act and the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act have raised more than $5.2 billion to protect and restore fisheries and habitat. Federal excise taxes on fishing gear, imposed at the insistence of fishers themselves, support hatcheries, stocking
programs, and habitat restoration. And anglers dedicate thousands of hours in volunteer work to restore streams and watersheds.
    In recent years, grassroots fishing organizations such as Trout Unlimited have lobbied for and won the removal of dams, allowing streams and rivers to once again run free. Some of the most
convincing evidence, in the campaigns for wild rivers, comes from fishing logs kept by anglers, their grandparents and their great grandparents. 

    So, ask the anti-anglers another question: How many rivers have you saved lately? -- Fish (probably) do not feel pain.
    Without question, anti-anglers accept the assumption that fish feel pain. PETA frequently quotes a 1980 British study called "The Medway Report," which states: "The evidence suggests that all vertebrates (including fish) . . . experience similar sensation to a greater or lesser degree in response to noxious stimuli." PETA literature also quotes a marine science professor who writes: "They experience agony parallel to our own."     But the best neurological evidence does not support such anthropomorphic declarations. Fish do not have brain structures comparable with the human neocortex; therefore fish are unlikely to consciously experience pain stimuli. What they do have are "wonderfully developed systems for avoiding or escaping from threats that are outside the limits of their typical habitats and thereby create physiological stress," says John G. Nickum, a zoologist who chairs the American Fisheries Society's committee on guidelines for the use of fishes in research.
    Even if what fish feel can be called pain, the sensation likely stops short of what humans consider suffering. As Brian Curtis, former supervising fisheries biologist for the California State Division of Fish and Game, wrote many years ago, the brain of the fish "fails to provide a home for the conscious association of ideas, and therefore robs pain of an imagination to work on." As for more radical, quasi-religious convictions by some animal rights advocates that fish are "experiencing subjects" with belief systems of their own, that position is even more unproveable. What fish do feel, when hooked, must be weighed against the greater good that anglers do in preserving habitat and protecting fisheries, and the care that they take. -- Good fishing is a moral act.
    Listen to PETA and you'd think anglers are just a bunch of unfeeling, unethical bozos in boats. (Well, a few are.) But it's important to let the public know that anglers were debating fishing ethics a long time before PETA arrived on the stream. They still are. Catch-and-release is practiced by a growing number of anglers. (PETA calls this practice "catch-and-torture," but short of stopping
fishing, what would PETA rather anglers do?) Some fishers consider catch-and-release simply a way to protect a valuable resource; others consider it a personal moral choice.     Whatever their reason for practicing catch-and-release, anglers continue to debate the best ways to  play and release a fish in order to reduce buildup of deadly lactic acid and improve mortality. Some bass tournament anglers now champion "paper weigh-ins," eliminating the need to keep fish in live wells. After half a century fishing for bass and crappie with often-lethal treble hooks, television-fishing pioneer Harold Ensley promotes single barbless hooks on fishing lures. And one company briefly manufactured an unlikely hook called TAG (for "touch and go") with a hook eye at both ends of a shaft, making setting the hook virtually impossible. Other, more practical measures include the creation of seasonal no-wading zones to protect spawning areas, and occasional fishing
moratoria on waters with too much sportfishing traffic -- to give the fish a break.
    Is catching and eating the most ethical kind of fishing? Some anglers believe so. As to that, PETA maintains that fishing is unnecessary because vegetarianism is a reasonable option. Certainly that's an honorable choice. But is our increasing emotional and intellectual detachment from the source of our
food honorable? All Americans -- including the non-vegan vegetarians who eat fish -- should be aware that fish are not born wrapped in cellophane, that they once lived and that their sacrifice
nourishes us. Nothing teaches that ethic as effectively as fishing.
-- What we seek, when we fish, is not trivial.     PETA's most egregious claim is that sportfishing is somehow based on trivial needs and desires. Of course fishing is fun. No need to apologize for that. But it's more than that. For most Americans, fishing remains a unifying language. Despite the divisions between the angling cultures, fishing always has been one of the few subjects that people of any color or ethnicity can share, with no preliminaries. The ritual of fishing binds the generations. "Far from trivial," fishing offers psychological, spiritual, and physical nourishment, says ethicist LaChat. And, it offers healing. For example, fishing programs for troubled kids and the mentally ill are remarkably effective. One non-profit program, Casting for Recovery, teaches fly-fishing to breast cancer survivors. "You
should see these women's eyes as, out in the natural world, they learn casting -- that graceful, mesmerizing, hypnotic thing of beauty," says Margot Page, a fly-fisher who serves on the board of Casting for Recovery. "I almost hate to say fishing. I'd rather call it water treatment. Yes, it's about the line and these wild flashes of light you see in the stream, but it's really the water that we go to and the water we've always gone to. For some kind of solace, for understanding, for cleansing, for
rebirth."
    If that sounds vaguely religious, so be it. When Norman Maclean wrote, "In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," he spoke for many of us. And this, finally, is where the argument leads. "The trouble with PETA is that they're trying to force their religion on us," says Sugar Ferris, founder of Bass'n Gal, a women's fishing association. "And that's not right."
-- Future generations deserve the right to fish.     The ultimate challenge will be to guarantee future generations the right to enjoy and learn from fishing. This is a truism in the worlds of fishing: No kid is likely to get in serious trouble if he or she is holding a fishing rod. What happens if we take away that rod? Certainly, direct, natural experience is more important to children than ever. The kind of personal freedom and access to nature that so many of us enjoyed when we were children seems a quaint artifact in an era of kid pagers, mall rats, and Nintendo bass fishing games. One sixth-grader says the reason he prefers to play indoors is because "that's where all the electrical outlets are." Surely this disconnection with nature, along with broken attachments to parents, is one cause for violence and drug dependence among the young. If we allow PETA, environmental degradation, or any other force to prevent kids from fishing, we only accelerate that process. The rising average age of anglers will erode financial support for conservation, shrink the political constituency for protecting our nation's waters, and diminish all our lives.     It's not too late to reverse the tide. Yes, fishing is messy -- morally messy -- but no child can truly know or value nature if the natural
world remains under glass, seen only through binocular lens, television screen or computer monitor. To begin to fathom the paradoxes of wildlife, the beauty and horror of nature, the sweetness of life  and the necessity of death, children must get their hands dirty and their feet wet. There is no other way. And no better instruction than fishing. -- Anglers of the world, unite.    What can we do? Quit fighting with other anglers. That's one step. The cultures of fishing -- fly-fishers, tournament bass anglers, steelheaders who use bait and steelheaders who fling flies, freshwater and salt water anglers, male anglers, female anglers and all the rest -- tend to ignore each other, sometimes with disdain. During my research for "Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An American Journey," a book about the cultures of fishing, one well-known steelhead fly-fisher of the Northwest refused to be interviewed because he didn't want his words appearing in any book that included bass tournament fishers. If the enemies of fishing wanted to divide and conquer anglers, they couldn't
do a better job than anglers have done to themselves.
    But what if America's 44 million sportfishers were to join forces? Their ranks would comprise one of the nation's most powerful environmental lobbies -- perhaps the largest -- championing the protection of nature and the preservation of fishing. Unlikely? Stranger things have happened. Conservative Ray Scott, father of the bass tournament culture, and liberal Robert Kennedy, Jr., a founder of the environmental organization Riverkeeper (which helped save the Hudson River), have joined forces to fight the Coast Guard's nasty habit of dumping toxic batteries in good water. Another model is the Coastal Conservation Association, launched in Texas and now spreading to other states. CCA is successfully battling against commercial over-fishing and for preserving
sportfishers' right to fish. (As much as 20 percent of U.S. coastal waters is slated for possible closure to recreational fishing because of commercial over-fishing, according to CCA.) The organization has successfully enlisted radically disparate types of anglers under one banner. In the worlds of fishing, cross-cultural campaigns -- though still rare -- work. In November, voters in Virginia and North Dakota quietly and overwhelmingly voted to make hunting and fishing constitutionally protected rights. They weren't joking. They weren't wishing the threat would go away. They were writing their own manifesto.

Richard Louv is the author of "Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An American Journey" (Simon & Schuster), a book about the cultures of fishing. He can be reached at rlouv@cts.com. To read more about the book, go to http://www.flyfishingforsharks.com Please feel free to e-mail this essay, if it is sent in its entirety, to as many fellow-anglers (or anti-anglers) as you wish.

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