I am far from being a vegan in my dietary habits. Put a medium rare steak in front of me, or chicken or…well almost any meat product short of organs or duck and lamb and I am quite satisfied.
When it comes to fish, I can kill a salmon and enjoy it from the grill with ease and lemon please. But, somewhere along the line, I drew the line killing trout. I know why. A camping trip long ago where I killed dozens of hatchery (‘put in take’) trout, put them in an ice chest and then ran out of ice. The trout ended up in the trash and that struck me as such a waste. I attached some sentimental process to that moment as the metal lid came down on the garbage can.
A large, beautiful trout is almost sacred to me…as much as a steelhead (same family). Yet, the equally beautiful, noble chinook that may have traveled as many miles as the steelhead gets wrapped on the noggin and gutted. Odd how these thought processes go.
Last year, I fished some waters in which large mouth bass had been introduced and were killing off the rainbow trout. I was encouraged to kill the bass. I couldn’t. I had no desire to eat the bass and to just kill it seemed improper.
Like many of our dearly held ideas, I have no clear thought process…beginning to end…on how I arrive at all this. I just hold onto my conviction that for a trout to die at my hands (my banging it across the head or by poor handling prior to release) is a bad thing.
But right now, I could really enjoy a juicy filet mignon. Such contradictions hey?
SwittersB & Exploring 
It’s an interesting contradiction. I recognize that I am basically a descendant hunter/gatherer, I do like meat (although not nearly as much as I did when I was younger) but I’ve never had a strong killer instinct and it grows even weaker with age. I think when you get older you realize how precious life is and what it takes it sustain it. We survived by eating other animals when it was not a choice. Today it’s a choice. We live in a time when life in our entire ecosystem is threatened by humans consuming it. I’ve never enjoyed snuffing out the lights of any living thing as I feel that in some way that they may be as conscious of themselves as I am and on the same journey as me.
So, as I grow older and still have the luxury of only having to do a minimal amount of killing I will be grateful for not having to do so. While some of the creatures we are surrounded by are quite tasty, like you say- they have their own beauty, their own stories and their own place and to wantonly waste that is in my mind, the greatest crime of those blessed with living.
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Thank you Wayne…beautifully stated!
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I eat meat, i wear fur, i dont cry over little piglets ending up on my plate, but i have never killed an animal for food. Not yet.
But yes, your trout story definitely sounds like such a sad waste…
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Agreed! Many years ago, my dad took me fishing once (and only once) and I loved it, until I actually caught a fish. When I saw it gasping for air and rolling its poor eyes all around, I begged my dad to throw it back. He got angry with me. (I wrote about this in my story “Fish Killer”). The strange things is, I don’t have a problem eating fish that I haven’t met? Definitely some contradictions in thought, for sure.
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The distance from the kill helps. My Dad could never bring himself to eat chicken after his boyhood of killing chickens.
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Not really a contradiction. I saw my uncle nearly beat a hunter to death who had killed a moose while on a drunken hunting trip with friends, then had no way to move those four massive quarters. They were leaving two of them to rot. Descended from the hunters who painted the Cathedral Caverns of Lasceuax Cave, we still have a sense of reverence for the food animals, use their images and words about them to show that revrerence, and that bit of humanity is the difference between a hunter/fisherman and a stupid, pathological killer.
Later…
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Perfectly written…thank you.
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Cheers ! Keep up the good work.
Later…
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Thank you Scott….admire your pace of life and surroundings. Very beautiful
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