CHAP. xxv. Does Angling Inflict Pain? 351 



several sailors. How do you account then, you will ask, for a fish 

 dashing away directly it feels it is hooked. I say it is not from pain, 

 but from fright at the sense of restraint. If it were from pain it would 

 give in sooner. Fish are equally frightened at the same feeling of 

 restraint in a net, and struggle hard to break through the meshes. 

 They will do the same from your hand. Fish were created for capture 

 and food, and I do not suppose that it is as unpleasant to be caught 

 with a hook as to be masticated by a Freshwater Shark. We have no 

 records of the sensations undergone in being masticated, whereas we 

 do know that drowning and hanging, forms of suffocation, are rather 

 pleasant than otherwise ; so those say who have tried, and I suppose 

 you would rather take their word for it than try yourself. There is 

 a vision of green fields. True, they didn't complete the experience, 

 but they liked it well enough "as far as they'd got" as Brigham Young 

 said of matrimony. And fish are killed by suffocation. They begin 

 by being out of breath as mentioned above, those which' are hooked 

 in the mouth more so than those that are hooked foul, because you 

 interfere more or less with their respiration. It is said, too, that a fish 

 is drowned by water entering through the gills. When out of water 

 they are still more suffocated unless, as some do, you kill them with a 

 blow. 



Mr. Henderson, in his " My Life as an Angler," writes that he had 

 just lost a fish with more than half the casting line, and immediately 

 after caught a 9 Ib. salmon in the same lie : 



" What was our surprise," he adds, " to see hanging from its mouth the 

 lost line with a long array of heavy shot attached to it. On examination we 

 found that the first set of hooks was planted far down in the stomach ; and 

 yet, though the long heavily-weighted line was hanging in a strong stream, 

 and therefore tugging at that most sensitive organ, our salmon's appetite 

 was equal to a second breakfast. Surely this bears out the comfortable 

 theory that fish have little feeling." 



In "The Moor and the Loch," by John Colquhoun, London, 

 John Murray, Albemarle Street, there is the following further testimony 

 to the same effect : 



" Having tied a cast rather hurriedly in the morning, I hooked a good 

 fish upon my bob . . . when the single knot slipped. Two days after, when 

 fishing the same place, I again hooked and killed a fine trout, upwards of a 

 pound weight, and to my astonishment my own handiwork, with two inches 



