TROUT AND TROUTING IN SPAIN. 177 



unfortunate trout has no fair play meted out to him in 

 this hungry land. No count is taken of his noble qualities, 

 nor of his economic necessities. Poor Salmo fario is here 

 simply a comestible, and nothing more. In season and 

 out, throughout the twelvemonth, he is persecuted — done 

 to death with nets, poison, and dynamite. We have else- 

 where remarked on the paradoxical character of the 

 Spanish cazador, and that of the pescado?- is the same. 

 Though observant of his quarry, apt, intelligent, and highly 

 skilled in the arts of sport, yet he is not a sportsman in 

 the truer sense of the term. His object is utilitarian, not 

 sentimental — he cultivates knowledge and the practices of 

 field-craft simply that he may fill the piichero. 



A large proportion of the adult male population of each 

 riverside hamlet in Northern Spain are Pescadores — pro- 

 fessional fishermen : and all day long one sees them 

 grovelling among the stones of the river-bed fixing those 

 hateful funnel-nets that, at night, entrap the luckless 

 trout as they wander over the shallows. But if they con- 

 fined their operations to these, and to the infinite variety 

 of nets of other shapes and forms that festoon the village 

 street, things might not be so bad, nor the case of the 

 trout so hopeless and desperate. They have far more 

 deadly devices for massacre by wholesale. Into the throat 

 of some lovely stream is tipped a barrow-load of quick- 

 lime : down goes the poisonous dose, dealing out death 

 and destruction to every fish, great or small, in that 

 stream : and, if that is not enough, or if the pool is long 

 and sullen, he proceeds to blow up its uttermost depths 

 with dynamite. And in the hot summer months, when 

 the streams, at lowest summer -level, run almost dry, the 

 heaviest trout are decimated by " tickling." 



These methods prevail in every part of Spain and 

 Portugal where trout or other edible fish exist. What 

 . chance have they to live ? 



There are, moreover, difficulties, either of law or of 

 custom, that, in some parts of Spain, render the preser- 

 vation of rivers troublesome, if not impossible. Hence 

 the poor Spanish Salmonidre can hardly hope to receive 



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