THE GAME FISHES OF THE WOELD 



the Tuna Club, At this time there was little demand for fishes 

 of the sea off Los Angeles county. The population of Los Angeles 

 was not fifty thousand, but the fishes were as the sands of the 

 beach and as easily caught. There had been no adjustment of 

 imaginative values. Men went fishing to see how many fish they 

 could catch, and to beat the other man in numbers, not sMll. 

 So the Tuna Club was founded, supposedly to catch fish, but 

 really that it might become the Pacific coast protagonist of a 

 new sporting philosophy. ' Thou shalt not kill unless it is 

 necessary.' Sport is legal, justifiable, and eminently proper 

 when the game can be used, but it is only a dog that wiU worry a 

 cat to enjoy the blood lust. It is only an odoriferous civet that 

 will creep into a hen coop and suck the blood of one hen after 

 another to see how many it can kfil. And that was what hap- 

 pened in Southern California when Los Angeles had fifty thousand 

 inhabitants. l^Tow it has almost six hundred thousand, and tons 

 of fish, the day's catch of one hundred hand-hners, are not towed 

 out into the channel and thrown away. The Tuna Club stopped 

 this desecration by educating the people, and with the other clubs 

 of the country it is still educating them, as there will always 

 be some who fish to kill ; we have not reached the millennium. The 

 Tuna Club accomplished what is conceived to be a remarkable 

 reform by organizing and setting a fashion in angling. It was 

 useless to ridicule or abuse a man for fishing with a hand-line 

 and catching a yeUowtail in three minutes with a small rope ; but 

 you could appeal to his pride and vanity, and without his knowing 

 it. Few men or women care to be very much out of the fashion. 

 So the Tuna Club was organized, funds raised for clubhouse ; 

 but we could not secure the land on Avalon Bay ; this came later. 

 We organized as a fishing club of gentlemen who had taken a one 

 hundred-pound tuna with a sixteen-ounce rod and a line not over 

 No. 24. I had taken a one hundred and eighty-three pound 

 tuna a few days before. 2*ro one could vote, but the one hundred 

 pound or over, tuna anglers. There were one hundred members 

 in a short time, then two or three hundred. There were no dues 

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