I have to backpack into where I go fly-fishing. I take a box of rice, a lemon, an onion and a bit of foil. I catch enough for dinner or I eat rice. It's a good incentive to improve my skills. There's no need to take more than I can eat.

Where I fish there are a lot of fisherman we release them so there will be something to catch next week. But we can keep two under 15 inches if we choose. I blog on several things and fly fishing on occasion. flipslife.com

Why do I fish??? I have no answer other than I jus love it and have since age 4. The instant a fish hits, the focus of the entire universe is on that one event, no matter what else is going on around you. Nuclear attacks would be put aside for that moment while you react to this rush of adrenaline and whatever other brainstem-level things surge through your entire being. God has met you with all his glory and all his mystery and all the surprise that transforms you from 21st century modern product of our advanced civilization to the most basic, elemental predatory reactor and grabber of prey which will feed you for another day! What a high! What a surge! What joy fills What an awesome accomplishment--I get my hands on this bite of food that forever gets away till now and now I got him!
All this emotion in a hundredth of a second! All for a 4 inch bluegill!

Great, thoughtful article. I too have been that guy cruising the streams with a #2 mepps treble hook, cursing live-bait fisherman. I don't kid myself anymore, and if I think there's a chance the fish won't make it, that's my dinner. I wish more fishermen/women carried the awareness you point to in your article with them while going after fish.

Very well put. There is fault and contradiction on both sides of the argument and this article addresses it all exceptionally. I mostly catch and release these days as I have enough food at home and the best lakes are usually restricted to the practice and other gear restrictions, but I still like to haul in a nice big salmon for the smoker too. Being honest with ourselves and fellow fisher-people is a big step forward.

First of all, catch and release fishing is a practice that should be done by all fishermen. Have any of you noticed that the quality of fishing goes down gradually year by year? This is mostly due to habitat loss. Our streams and rivers can simply not support as many fish as they could 30 years ago. So we have less fish than before and now people who claim they love fishing want nothing to do with conserving it. Now I do not think that keeping a few trout after a day of fishing is immoral at all. However, 9 out of 10 of you reading this right now do the same thing every time you go fishing: Harvest a bunch of fish, clean them, bag them and throw them into an overflowing freezer where you will discover them 7 months later with freezer burn. Now those same fish that you took life from so they can sit in your freezer could have stayed in the river and reproduced. Its a simple concept.

Secondly, catch and release is rarely life-threatening for the fish. Yeah there is a hiccup every once in a while but hey, if you gut hook a trout you can keep him and add him to your freezer collection. Let everything else go. I have caught thousands of fish in my lifetime and never kept one. But I have caught fish with bite marks in the side, fish with paracites, fish with luers stuck in their throat, and even seen fish with claw marks on their back from escaping a bird of prey. My point is that if a trout can live after being dropped by a bird then I can gaurentee you that a trout can live after being hooked and released.

I spent a great deal of time on the water with my grandfather growing up. He had passed his farm to my uncle by the time I can remember and spent his time on the lake. Nearly every day June to Sept. he released a lot but would keep a few fish every trip out. All sorts of species, whatever we felt like going after. We'd eat some that day and the rest would go in the freezer. In September he'd have a fish fry at the cottage, extended family, friends, neighbors. Was great. The family still has it, 20 years since he passed... may not
Sound it but he was a conservationist along the lines of your article. He taught us to put the big and small back, keep some of the medium sized and the ones we hurt. And so we understood there was a purpose for fishing. I think when you understand that purpose it gives you a stronger drive for protecting and conserving the resources. I started spending a lot of time on the water with my son this year. He's 4. He'd like to keep everything he catches but he knows that we put most back and a few in the bucket. If we hurt the fish he goes in the bucket. There is something really special in the pride on the face of a 4 year old running his bucket up to show his mama the fish he got for supper. My grandfather understood that too and in those moments now I can almost hear him chuckling to himself the way he did years ago when we kids would jump out of the boat and run up ahead of him with our bucket years ago.

From a very young age I hunted 'pest' animals such as possums, and later, game animals and birds. In New Zealand all the animals and birds I've hunted are introduced, and numbers of larger game animals like thar and deer absolutely need control to protect both them and the environment from overpopulation. I have occasionally let deer walk away, for various reasons. I only take what I am going to use. I also find the debate over killing animals very challenging, but I'm comfortable with the decisions I make to take or to leave.

New Zealand trout also are introduced. This aspect to our trout population management is very important. I think it differentiates between the need for the protection of a native population for ecological reasons, and the need to maintain a healthy population of imports for the enjoyment of other anglers.

Here in New Zealand we have recently been unfortuanately encumbered with an proportionally large and rapid growth in nett migration, which is now challenging us in almost all facets of our lives, including trout fishing. Not just because more trout are being caught. More and more of our waterways are becoming more and more polluted, and more and more pressure is being put on water as a resource that industry somehow sees as 'theirs' to do with whatever they want. Incredibly, there are even people here who hold the view that 'fresh' water running out a river mouth into the sea without having been 'used' somehow, is 'wasted'!

My choice to put trout back is weighted largely by the requirement that if I take food home to my family it must be healthy. So while I might take a trout from one of our remaining unspoilt waterways, I do not take them from lowland river areas such the lower Tukituki and Ngaruroro rivers. I may also leave trout from clean upland waterways where populations are very low - but that is in the spirit of sharing the resource with fellow anglers.

Ultimately, there is also an expectation that the managers of our trout populations should put our license fees to good use and maintain appropriate fish numbers but apart from these funds being diverted into habitat protection (no point releasing trout into polluted water), another unfortunately another aspect to NZ's game management is that (unless it's changed) our Fish and Game organisation is not allowed to release fish into Conservation areas (virtually all our public forest/ bush areas). So a number of upland rivers hold only relatively low numbers of trout.

For all these reasons I release most of the trout I catch, and I treat them as carefully as I can during capture (landing, crushed barbs, wet hands, no pressure on heart area when handling etc) to ensure they have the best chance of survival.

Where I live, a lot of the lakes and rivers are full of stunted trout because the numbers are too large for the available food supply. There fore it is actually a good thing to keep some for the pan as long as it is not excessive. I only keep enough for a meal for two...fresh is always best! I see nothing wrong with this.

It's a well written article, though the praise stops there. Maybe you are enlightened, intelligent, and knowledgeable, enough so that you can make correct decisions about how many and what size trout it is acceptable to kill from each watershed without harming the resource. Maybe you're not. The fear is, that many others are emphatically not, and their numbers are legion. Keep the conversation to no kill, catch and release, and one does the most good to protect the resource. Some released fish unfortunately die, all creeled fish unsurprisingly die. One would do well in preserving our passion and sport to focus on educating others on improved fish handling practices rather than opining on the quality of wild trout as table fare. I do not look down upon keepers of trout, whether they be wild or stocked, I view these poor people with extreme pity because if those individuals cannot recognize that needlessly eliminating such beauty from this world is a furtherance of its ever growing ugliness, what hope is there for them? Or else they are starving. If you are starving and the only option is a trout, there is something to be said for survival and I won't begrudge a human that. I'm writing this as a man that has had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a number of trout, some wild; by choice I have only eaten only grocery store trout, and I've never suffered from a nutritional deficiency. Grocery store trout couldn't be that lacking. The beautiful trout in streams are a precious resource that is not easily replaced, the already dead ugly ones at the grocery store get shipped in almost daily. If you want to keep a trout, and its legal to do so, I can't say much about that other than that I expected more from my fellow man or woman. If for whatever reason you cannot adequately appreciate and respect beauty and must remove it from the world maybe, just maybe, in the interest of others and the sport, or if it connects with you better, for your own self-interest, keep your trout quietly and otherwise make public statements to protect the resource.

Being an outdoor writer with membership in both the Outdoor Writers Association of America and the Texas Outdoor Writers Association, I have written about this catch n' release versus catch n' keep on several occasions. All regarding bass and trout. Yes, I do keep bass and have eaten two seven pounders and God only know how many weighing from two-to-six pounders.

To me this catch n' release has become a philosophical/religious entity in itself. It has been said by both professional bass anglers and local associates that eating a bass ranges from eating your pet dog to having sexual relations with your sister. Barbara Streisand as Rush Limbaugh says in using her name to equate to what the bull does in the field or his pen. While about three or four have had a bad taste, the vast majority have been great. I have even had fellow co-workers ask if I have bass left-over for lunch they have been so good.

I have seen and heard about some private land-owners who insist on catch n' release, only to see their bass fishery decline to such a point that they have needed to start over and believe me it costs. Now do I keep all the bass I catch, absolutely not!!! I limit myself to three bass per trip and once again I use the phrase God only knows if I am that lucky to catch three. It is the way nature works.
Now I live in Alaska during the summers and yes, I practice catch n' release where required. It is the law. However, I know of certain places where catch n' keep is encouraged.

Is it a crime or sin to keep and eat bass or trout - absolutely not. Where allowed do so if you wish.

A thoughtful piece that plays right into the hands of fisheries managers here in Montana who lately assert that killing more river trout, especially large ones, will increase numbers of trout -- quality vs. quantity. Montana's rivers are all populated by wild fish; river stocking stopped here in 1974. It's the same fisheries managers who are killing entire streams to rid them of non-native brown, brook and rainbow trout for the perpetuation of native cutthroat trout. In the first case, fisheries managers are shirking their responsibility to regulate fishing pressure on the state's blue-ribbon rivers and hoping that anglers will do the job and settle for less in the bargain. In the second case, many here argue that "a trout is a trout" and oppose the cutthroat-only genocide for a species that is bound to be out-competed again. As to stocked trout, the author's argument is perfectly valid.