Keep Asking

I really haven't been getting out into the blogosphere much lately. I link to a number of fine fishing blogs, but don't visit them as much as I used to. Feeling little guilty of poor blogospheric citizenship, I toured a few this morning to see what I've been missing.

A blog I discovered this summer that I like a lot is The Fly Fishing Rabbi. Earlier this week, the Rabbi took up the question of whether fly fishing is humane. His answer, quickly put, is yes, but as with so many questions, the answer is less interesting than the reasoning leading to it.

His answer is rooted (surprise!) in Jewish scripture and tradition, and he points out that these sources regard animals as worthy of moral concern and imbued with rights. This point deserves emphasis because it poses a challenge. So many sportsmen, wary of animal rights activists, would reject the claim out of hand, vehemently. (And while I don't accept the idea of animals having rights in the way we usually undersand the term, I could get on board with the forms of rights described in the Hebrew Bible, and I believe many sportsmen could.) I think opposition to PETA--which in itself is reasonable on many grounds--has tended to shut down thinking about our relations with nonhuman others, leading people to assert human dominion without much reflection about what that means. The Rabbi suggests a little ambivalence about those human prerogatives has some value:

When fly fishing, I still sometimes feel a little bit guilty. And I am not sure there is any way around it. In fact, I would say that feeling guilty about fly fishing is probably a good thing, if that feeling motivates us to be as humane as possible with the fish.

One implication of this is that these moral reflections draw our attention, our consciousness back to the fish. When our interactions with animals become rote and matter of fact, some distance sets in between us and them. (I think this applies to most of the relationships we have.) Which, in my book at least, diminishes the overall worth of the experience.

To keep open questions of ethics need not result in either paralyzing angst or saggy relativism. While there are certainly bright lines of right and wrong, exploring the hazier span between them keeps us consciously engaged with our life and what fills. And the work of clarifying our values may expand our sense of what is valuable and why. As the Rabbi says:

To practice catch and release fishing is to acknowledge that trout are precious. With our expensive fly rods and exquisitely tied flies, we may have the ability to catch many fish on a stream. We also have the responsibility to treat a trout with respect and dignity, for a fish is a beautiful living creature whose source is ultimately divine.