Will humans be the next dinosaurs?

Over the past two hundred years, eighty-nine species of animals have gone extinct, and another 140 are on the endangered lists and will be gone by the end of this century. The world is in the midst of the most devastating mass extinction period in history, including the one that wiped out all the dinosaurs.

The oceans have been particularly hard hit. The total biomass of the ocean's top level predators has decreased by 90% in the past 50 years, primarily because of overfishing and some of the destructive fishing methods employed by commercial fishermen. But Sports fishermen too, have taken a terrible toll.

In the US alone, there are more than 50 million sports fishermen, spending 125 billion dollars in pursuit of of fish. But most sports fishermen are careful not to injure anything they don't intend to eat. 'Catch and release' has become the order of the day on the streams, lakes, and coastal waters of North America. But it takes all kinds to make a world and there are still many people who are not only indifferent to the agonies they inflict on other creatures – animals or people – but are deliberately sadistic. When fishing, anything they catch that they can’t eat or sell, no matter what it is, from a dogfish to a seagull, is treated with sadistic cruelty. Some go out of their way to see the creatures die as painfully and as slowly as possible.

For these people, wherever the fish aren't biting, there are always seagulls or ducks to test their fishing skills. Live minnows or herring will always attract birds that will chase baited hooks into the water. It's not that the birds are 'stealing', although that's how the fishermen justify their cruelty, seagulls and ducks think that injured fish splashing on the surface of the water are their natural prey and aren't aware that these little fish were deliberately impaled on a hook in such a way that its dying agonies would attract an unsuspecting fish – or bird.

Sports fishermen kill an awful lot of little fish that way. Threading them on their hooks, carefully avoiding vital organs so they will live a long time, struggling frantically in pain and fear. This torture is not usually inflicted on them maliciously, only callously, without compassion. It's just an effective way to attract larger, unsuspecting predators. The longer the herring lives, the less frequently the fisherman has to re-bait his hook. The torture is just the price the little fish has to pay for being such an attractive bait. C'est la guerre.

Seagulls, as you probably know if you have ever tried feeding them, are very adept at catching food before it hits the water. Consequently, when a fisherman casts a herring-baited hook into the air, there is a very good chance it'll be taken by a gull before it hits the water. It's sort of like sky fishing, except there are no flying fish in North American waters.

Before I started diving, I used to join the throng of fishermen that gathered on the wharf in Comox, on Vancouver Island, each January and February, fishing for Spring (Chinook) salmon. In those days, a large run of the big fish always spent a few weeks in the bay, feeding voraciously on spawning herring in preparation for their own spawning run up the Puntledge River in March. Fishermen crowded the end of the dock during those weeks and most were quite successful. But the fish always quit feeding by mid-morning and the action slowed down until early evening, during which time only the real die-hards remained on the wharf.

While fishing was good, the fishermen were quick to get their lines into the water before a hungry gull could steal their bait. Not out of compassion, but because reeling the bird in and getting it off their hook consumed a lot of good fishing time, resulting in fewer salmon for their freezers. Often when a seagull was unfortunate enough to get caught during these times, the fisherman would simply cut his line leaving the seagull to fly away with the big salmon hook still in its beak or throat. During slack fishing times from 9am to 5pm though, there was always some sadist, bored by inaction, who would deliberately try to catch a bird for sport.

If I was on the dock, it invariably led to an altercation of some kind, often a fist fight, until the regulars got smart enough not to do it while “that self-appointed seagull protection officer” was on the scene. Don’t get me wrong, there were many who sided with me on the seagull issue. It was just too bad that they didn't also feel compassion for the bullheads, sea perch, and other ’trash’ fish they often left lying squirming and gasping their lives away for hours on the dock. Nor did many of them think twice about slicing a dogfish open and throwing it, still living, back into the water, just because it was a nuisance.

One guy, who was far too big for me to tackle in a rough-and-tumble, liked to dare me by periodically kicking anything he caught as it lay writhing on the wharf. I had previously reported him to a Fisheries Officer friend of mine for trying to catch seagulls, which is illegal, and he had been warned not to do it again. He took revenge by torturing everything else he got his hands on.

One day he caught a rock cod about 15 inches long and very deep bodied. I estimated that it weighed six to eight pounds. My ‘friend’ tore the hook from its mouth, threw it on the deck of the wharf and kicked it. Happily, the dorsal fin of the flopping fish was fully extended with its long sharp spines pointed directly at the toe of the foot speeding toward it. Happily too, the foot was clad in a canvas running shoe which a couple of spines had no difficulty penetrating. Nor did the spines have any trouble embedding themselves deeply in the massive toe before they broke off.

The man howled in pain, I howled with joy, and the fish flopped over the 8” wharf bumper, back into the water from whence it had come – maybe for the sole purpose of retaliating for all the cruelties its fellow creatures had suffered at the hands and feet of the man monster? I have no idea what became of the man because he never came back to the wharf. C'est la guerre.