Gamefish Again?

(from the July, 2007 issue of National Fisherman)

Do you have a hobby that involves growing or building stuff, or do you know anybody that does? If so, you know that it can get really expensive. Amateur gardeners pay way above market price to grow their own tomatoes and eggplants and squash. Amateur mechanics put hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars into rebuilding a 50 year old car that cost a couple of thousand dollars when new. Amateur cabinetmakers invest thousands and thousands of dollars in workshops to build bookshelves and armoires and dry sinks. And amateur fishermen can spend hundreds of dollars for every pound of fish they catch.

Someone that lives in Princeton whose salary is a quarter of a million dollars a year, with a garden that takes up 5% of a lot worth a million dollars and a John Deere garden tractor that cost $5,000 could probably make a convincing argument that, counting labor and land and capital, his tomatoes cost $500 a pound. Anybody who’s familiar with classic car auctions knows that a well-restored muscle car from the sixties can easily sell for twenty or thirty or more times what it cost when new. With hardwoods costing ten or twenty dollars a board foot and hobby-sized planers and table saws ranging upwards of a thousand bucks, furniture that you could buy for a couple of hundred dollars would, including your time, cost much more to build.

Could you imagine an elected official, one at any level, therefore arguing that the agriculture industry or the automobile industry or the furniture industry should be shut down? That amateurs spent so much more to produce goods, and that their expenditures per pound or per vehicle or per end table were therefore so much more valuable to the economy, that they should be the sole producers of those goods?

Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Evidently not in our Congress.

For what seems like the dozenth time, New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone, this year along with Maine’s Congressman Tom Allen, has introduced legislation to make striped bass a gamefish coast-wide. Their “justification” for doing this is that their recreational fishing constituents spend much more money to catch striped bass than commercial fishermen get for the same fish at the dock. According to them, it’s a waste of the resource to allow the non-fishing members of the public to ever enjoy this delicious fish unless they are given one by the sportsman or woman that they’re lucky enough to have as a friend.

What do these legislators, whose non-angling constituents outnumber anglers by perhaps a hundred to one, want them to give up? In 1634, William Wood wrote in New England’s Prospects “The Basse is one of the best fishes in the Countrey, and though men are soone wearied with other fish, yet are they never with Basse. It is a delicate, fine, fat, fast fish...pleasant to the pallat, and wholesome to the stomach”  (from the classic The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery by McClane & deZanger). And nobody with even semi-educated taste buds has disagreed in the intervening 373 years.

The proponents of this legislation try to support it with two bogus arguments. The first is that the recreational striped bass fishery is increasingly “catch and release” and more conservation-oriented. Au contraire, recreational “catch and release” striped bass mortality is now greater than the total commercial harvest. The second is that the consumers will still have access to aquacultured striped bass. Fact is that no one is growing real saltwater striped bass for the market. Instead, they are culturing a striped bass/white perch hybrid in fresh water. It’s not the same. McClane and deZanger recognize this, writing “landlocked populations of striped bass ... (are) inferior to a prime fish taken from saltwater.”

So, according to Congressmen Pallone and Allen, a handful of fishing hobbyists deserve exclusive access to the entire crop of one of the finest seafood products that’s available from our coastal waters, offering 300+ million non-fishing consumers an aquacultured “substitute” that doesn’t even come close, because those anglers spend so much more to catch the striped bass they catch. This is while those same anglers, using the latest in “catch and release” methodology, are killing and wasting more striped bass than the non-fishing consumers are allowed to consume.

If these two Congressmen get away with punishing commercial fishermen, and the consumers they work for, for fishing as efficiently and environmentally responsibly as they can, look out Broyhill, Ford and Con-Agra, ‘cause you might be next.

Nils E. Stolpe