32 FISHES OF WESTERN SOUTH AMERICA 
odic fishing-parties of entire villages, gala events, on which streams and lakes were 
thoroughly poisoned and the whole fish-population removed, by the use of bar- 
bascum. The fishes when in their last struggles were retrieved by baskets used as 
dipnets, larger ones by bow and arrow. 
Today there are statutes and decrees forbidding the use of poisons, and the prac- 
tise no longer takes place in the open, except in the remotest districts. Yet the 
opposition to it arises more from the fears of cattle owners than from motives of 
conservation. 
Europeans sometimes hesitate to eat fish taken in this manner, but no one is 
ever harmed by doing so. 
