Philosophical Reflections on Idaho Trout Fishing
As I sit down to write this, I have just returned from a family fishing trip in Idaho. We caught four trout, and a nice couple who had caught one too many gave us an additional one for a total of five. It felt wonderful to be out in nature after being cooped up for the last few months because of the COVID-19 lockdown, and more so since this was my first time fishing in several years.
There is something transcendent about fishing, being one with nature and with the minds of the fish we lure and catch. 20th-century philosopher Henry Bugbee wrote quite eloquently of his experiences and reflections of his Montana fishing excursions, broadly in the tradition of American transcendentalism pioneered by Henry David Thoreau:
Now the river is the unborn, and the sudden fish is just the newborn — whole, entire, complete, individual, and universal. The fisherman may learn that each instant is pregnant with the miracle of the new-born fish, and fishing in the river may become a knowing of each fish even before it is born. As he fishes the ever-flowing current, it teaches him of the fish even before it is born, just in so far as this alert fishing involves “abiding in no-abode,” or the “unattached mind.” If one is steeped in the flowing river and sensitized through the trembling line, one anticipates the new-born fish at every moment. The line tautens and with all swiftness, the fish is there, sure enough! And now, in the leaping of this fish, how wonderfully, laughingly clear everything becomes! If eventually one lands it, and kneels beside its silvery form at the water’s edge, on the fringe of the gravel bar, if one receives this fish as purely as the river flows, everything is momently given, and the very trees become eloquent where they stand. (Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form)
It’s a biological truism that for something to live, something else has to die, whether plant or animal. So one can hardly fault any living being, animal to human, for the death of another living creature for the sake of survival. Predators in the wild aren’t blamed for their predation, and we don’t expect bears or wolves or bald eagles to become vegetarians. Why then should humans being any different when it comes to hunting or fishing?
(Rainbow trout flailing for its life on the shore, having been plucked from the water by its human predators)
The arguments for and against vegetarianism still abound, which they have done at least since Nietzsche’s time:
Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there still is no such philosophy!) (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, No. 7)
And while I am in no danger of becoming a vegetarian, I was haunted today by the needlessness and wastefulness of catching fish for food. As thrilling as it was to feel the tug of the trout on the line, reeling in each new fish and wondering how big or how small the fish would be (i.e., exactly how short I cut the life of each poor trout!), and to walk away from the pond with the evening meal dangling like spoils of war from the stringer I clutched so proudly in my hand, I also died a little myself inside watching the fish take their last breath one by one before expiring, seeing (anthropomorphizing?) the terror in the fishes’ eyes as I yanked them from their watery home and plunked them on the unforgiving ground to dig the brassy hook from their bellies with my needle-nose pliers, those fish-sized jaws of life, and seeing our string of fish floating belly-up in the shallow waters, dying alone with their dead kinsmen piling up around them like the medieval plague victims waiting to be carted away in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
(Frozen terror in the eyes of our cache of rainbow trout, cleaned and prepped for cooking)
I’m no stranger to cleaning fish, but I was struck by the savagery of it all as I sliced open the fishes’ bellies to remove their bowels, almost feeling the cut of the knife within myself as I marveled at how easily a living creature can go from swimming happily in a pond, blissfully ignorant of its own impending doom, to being reduced in dignity to becoming the evening meal for us human barbarians, all while rinsing their blood from my hands and from the knife I wielded just a little too gleefully. And even though no one would accuse the eyes of a trout of being overly expressive, I swear I could see the frozen terror in our catches’ eyes even as their gutted corpses lay lifeless inside a Ziploc baggie, those miniature bodybags of fishermen everywhere.
It’s ironic that this fishing trip took place in my new state of Idaho, land of potatoes, since Henry David Thoreau once claimed in Walden that he had lost his taste for fishing, seeing as how a few potatoes would have satisfied his hunger as well and with far less mess, far less waste of the fish’s life, and far less of his own time and labor:
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that “some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;” and they lay it down as “a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly,” . . “and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,” content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way,—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn,—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Higher Laws)
So why do we anglers here in Idaho, land of potatoes, of all places, feel the need to become fishermen-barbarians all over again, to turn our back on civilized society, if only for the day, and become one with nature in such a way that we end up killing the very objects of our veneration? Undoubtedly many fishermen, myself included, have great reverence for the fish they catch, kill, and consume, perhaps in the same way that many Native American tribesmen would often thank the animals they would kill and consume for having sacrificed their lives. (I still can’t help but think that the animals fundamentally remain in protest whether they are being killed by Native Americans or by Idahoans. So much for the romance of Native American life compared to our own!)
The male member of the nearby fishing couple who gave us one of their fish was an excellent case in point. When he caught his fish, he talked almost lovingly to them, like a parent telling his child that it would all be okay even as the child lay on its deathbed. What else can a parent do? One might equally ask, “What else can a fisherman do?” And yet, it is our choice to fish. We rob the fish of its life for the sake of our own bellies, for some romanticized notion of the the natural order of things, some carnivorous version of Thomas Hobbes’s State of Nature—a war of everyone, whether fish or fisherman, against everyone, in which we are fortunate enough to be at the top of the food chain.
I wonder if I could ever train myself out of being a fisherman. Before this trip, I hadn’t fished in about seven years. And although I have eaten fish and countless other creatures since, not being a vegetarian myself, at least I didn’t have to do the deed or the dirty work myself to get my fill of fish or fowl. Yet I admit it that my spirit does rise at the prospect of being an active fisherman once again. Perhaps it’s mere primal instinct within me as a member of the human race—we predators who love to act so civilized except when push comes to shove (also likely accounting for the social darwinism so pervasive in the American mindset, and in our society and politics). Perhaps it’s a sense of self-sufficiency of the kind that Thoreau himself felt all of those years ago on the shores of Walden Pond. Perhaps it’s also the genuinely transcendent sense of oneness with nature that Thoreau and Bugbee and all outdoorsmen must have felt to some degree, from humanity’s earliest days, as expressed in my own silent calmness while wielding my rod and reel with fully Heideggerian expectation of a string and a belly full of fish, and expressed more verbally in my neighbor fisherman’s tender, almost romantic words to the dying fish flailing helplessly on the ground at his own feet, time after time, seemingly unaware that his own fisherman activities are more by choice than by necessity, as they were also for Thoreau.
(Whole broiled rainbow trout, a most undignified end for such a majestic creature)
So I will cook our fish, look them in the eye staring up at me from the frying pan while their flesh and their eyes turn opaque in their doneness. I will try to do so reverently as the Native Americans tried and try to do, not savagely as we conquistadors of fish sometimes do. And I will try not to salivate too much at the thought of buttery trout on my tongue and in my own hungry bowels, which I’m luckier to still possess than the poor fish being digested within them.
Perhaps we will never know what it’s like to be a fish (or a bird, or a bat, as Thomas Nagel once showed us in his famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”—republished in the book Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel). And yet, I have no doubt that fish delight at swimming the cool waters of Idaho as much as we fishermen delight in catching them. I have no doubt that they feel fear as they are being reeled in and dragged ashore by the invisible hand of some capricious god made incarnate in the form of my translucent fishing line. I have no doubt that they scream silently in pain and agony as I rip the hook from their flesh and slice into their bellies, a most undignified end for these most beautiful creatures so alien to us and yet with eyes so sympathetic and familiar even in their unblinking gaze.
We may never know which aspects of human consciousness, which emotions and sensibilities, are universal, multiply realizable by a variety of living species, whether human or animal or perhaps even alien elsewhere in the cosmos, and which are specific to us humans. But when I look into the eyes of a dying trout, I see something universal and cross-species, something shared between us as co-inhabitors of Earth and co-inheritors of the genetic legacy left to us by our most recent common ancestor some untold billions of years ago. Yes, my dinner and I are cousins, a million times or more removed.
So as I prepped and cooked and consumed our trout dinner, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a most undignified end for such a dignified creature, once shimmering in the waters of Idaho but now dismembered on my dinner plate. But is any human end any more dignified, no matter how much we sheath ourselves in linens and caskets of wood or iron or steel, whether beneath the ground or above it in a mausoleum, whether our bodies are intact or consumed by fire?
The specific trout I had for dinner tonight may have met the same end as so many others of his race, but the least I can do is immortalize him in the ramblings of a fish-catching and fish-eating philosopher, preserved for the ages better than any museum or taxidermist could ever accomplish. Is that a more fitting end for my noble trout than any other end he might have met in the wild? Perhaps not, but it’s arguably a better legacy.
For Further Reading:
The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form by Henry Bugbee
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
