Charlie Tuna is a disturbing figure.  Seriously, he is a tuna who advocates the eating of his fellow fish.  This Uncle Tom seems downright giddy at the thought of the naked land monkey’s devouring his friends and family, and vehemently rejects that any of his people’s hated rivals - the dolphins - were harmed during their wholesale slaughter.   Charlie Tuna is exactly like those craven traitors who helped the aliens (Visitors) in the V series…bastards Marc Singer should have killed all of them.  Also there is something fundamentally wrong with wearing a hat but not pants or at least some strategically placed kelp.

Now most examples of anthropomorphism are benign often intended for children.  A child has a very limited capacity to think outside of himself.  This is a natural state for a child, it is hard to imagine the point of view of  another until you are the master of your own.  However, a frightening number of adults seem to have this developmental handicap as well.  Most of these people tend to join PETA.

On the surface I think that I should be in PETA, or perhaps even its spokesperson.  I am 100% dedicated to the ethical treatment of animals.  I believe that in order for a person to be noble, he must have a sense of compassion for all living things.  Where PETA makes their mistake is in defining “ethical” as “equal.”    True believers value human lives no differently than the lives of  rats or crickets.  Probably the best example of this comes from one of my least favorite monkeys - Bill Maher.

“To those people who say, `My father is alive because of animal experimentation,’ I say `Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live.’ Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of trade off.”

Bill Maher

Normally I break down and given my opinion on the quotes I use.  The idiocy of this one seems to speak for itself.  Dave Matthews - a bigger moron - advises that people wouldn’t need animal testing to produces cures for diseases if they weren’t “schmos” who got sick in the first place.  These people and their ilk make me long for the days of dueling…Freedom of Speech meant a lot more when a man was held to account for what he said…guess that makes me a Retro-sexual - a man they way men used to be.

A more interesting question would be this:

My father needs a heart transplant to live, assuming Bill Maher was a genetic match would it be ethical for me to kill him to save my father?  The key word is ethical not right, there is a difference.  This question is actually just a twist on the classic lifeboat allegory.  Say you and your family are in a lifeboat, and there is a stranger drowning.  You could pull the stranger into the boat and save him, but doing so reduces the likelihood that you and your family will survive.  Is it more ethical to let the stranger drown, to protect your family, or to risk everyone to save one person?  Oh yeah one rule…you can’t cite religion or laws.  Why?  Because religion and laws are an external authority, basically you’d be passing the buck.  That’s not to say religious or secular codes are unethical, only not as fun when it comes to answering the ethics questions.  Keep in mind there is no right answer, just the one you can live with.

Oh and I would totally kill Bill Maher to save my father…or my dog…or one of its ticks.

A lion killing and eating a gazelle is not an ethical failure, nor can the sea gulls that prey on the baby turtles be likened to Nazis, if a woman climbs into a polar bear’s den at the zoo and the bear mauls her he is not a criminal - in fact he probably did the world a favor.   Humans are animals.  Animals use other living creatures for their survival.  We keep livestock, hunt, and have even cultivated plants…but so have ants.

“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.”

Mark Twain

So a human who tortures an animal is a villain, but a Killer Whale that plays with a seal is honing its hunting skills.  Ants keep aphids as cattle, or are they slaves.  Of all the branches of philosophy, I find ethics to be the most interesting and the most misunderstood.  It is also the most human.  Suffice to say the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have at best an incomplete, more likely an immature, view of ethics.

Fly fishermen are not immune to this  mindset though in a different way.  Many tend to anthropomorphize the fish they seek.  Again most of this is fairly benign, describing strikes and takes as vicious, angry, or greedy.  There are even a few of us who do exactly the opposite, pull a Mr. Limpet, and claim that we can “Think like a fish.”

For the record if you can think like a fish, I want nothing to do with you.  The very notion is almost as disturbing as Charlie Tuna - that Judas.  First off do fish even think?  Truly think or do they merely make associations?  Do they even gather data the same way we do?  Are colors the same to them as they are to us? are sounds?  Do they have preferences?  Do mayflies taste better than caddis, do they even care?

I’m certain that most of those questions have answers.  Some guy in a scorched lab coat and thick glasses knows the answers.  But he knows them because of his human intelligence, not because he can think like a fish.

Yet how often when reading a magazine or other piece of fly fishing literature do you see phrases like “if you were the trout what would you want,” or even the simple claim that larger fish are smarter.  I believe the biggest fish in a body of water are simply the ones who are best at being fish.  They find food, they avoid predators, and they make baby fish - that they then try to eat.  Fish do not attack a frog with malice, nor are they lazy.  Fish are efficient.  If they do not need to expend energy to take helpless prey then they will not, if they need a burst of speed to capture a substantial meal then they will do so.

Pike are not evil, nor are trout good.  In many ways fish do not have wants only needs.  A few years ago I made the conscious decision to try and catch only large fish.  I adjusted my tactics thinking in terms of what a large fish wanted, what it could do that a smaller fish could not.  I thought of them as being like school-yard bullies.

Then I made a simple adjustment to my thinking, and instead of thinking of them in emotional terms, I thought about larger fish as being simply the most efficient fish in the ocean.  The calories in versus calories out dynamic.  So instead of thinking, that big striper can bust through that bait ball and scare the crap out of all that bunker.  I thought, sooner or later a bunker will break away from that bait ball, when it does the big striper that has been shadowing them can grab it with a single sweep of its tail.

Just a simple - perhaps obvious - change of thinking.  Yet this has led to more success than any change of flies or equipment.  So next time you are out and you find yourself thinking of the fish in human terms, remember fish do not hate, they are not cruel, they feel no anger, they hold no grudges.

They aren’t like us.