Salmon and Trout Association: Blog

Moral Dilemmas

Paul Knight - January 2009

This is all a bit new – my first blog on a completely revamped web site. The way S&TA works these days is still newish as well, because, despite the fact we’ve been going 106 years, we’ve been a charity for less than twelve months. That makes you think differently; gets you away from the; “we’re a bunch of anglers, we demand our rights!” type of approach to arguments, and more towards where angling and fisheries fits into the overall scheme of things.

It’s interesting times, too, because there are some moral dilemmas out there at the moment. I’ve just come back from Scotland, where I am part of a Government Working Group on what to do about mixed stock salmon netting on the Scottish coast. We and our fisheries colleagues think that coastal netting should be stopped, simply because it makes it impossible to manage single river stocks effectively – the netsmen have no idea whether the fish they have just knocked on the head was returning to a river with a healthy stock, or one really struggling to survive. The dilemma, of course, is whether you force the netsmen out of business and destroy that local social heritage, for the greater good of Scottish salmon populations. We believe it’s right to do so, because there is a greater public benefit from well managed salmon stocks, but the netsmen obviously don’t! So, we have to find a way of doing it with the least impact on the netsmen and their communities. We think we can do that, but you’ll have to wait a bit to find out how – there’s much work still to be done and three more meetings between now and the end of May, before the Working Group makes its report and recommendations to the Scottish Government.

And there’s plenty more moral issues. Is it right to introduce beavers back into the UK after a long absence - it’s great for beaver lovers, but what effect will they have on rivers, fish and the overall ecology of our overcrowded, heavily managed island? Cormorants are in the news again – it looks as though there might be a pan-European management plan on the way for them - so how much protection should we give the birds and how much the fish on which they prey? Is it acceptable for water companies to abstract water from a river system to such an extent that the environment and its ecology deteriorates drastically? – after all, we need water to live; but then, so does all its dependent wildlife.

So, being Chief Executive of a fisheries charity makes you look at these issues in a more joined up way – how can fish, cormorants, otters, herons, even beavers, not to mention anglers and netsmen, coexist, and how can we join up all those different management and conservation issues into one, coordinated policy for all our water wildlife and the environment on which it depends?

And then there’s land management and farming. I’m writing this on the train between Salisbury and Waterloo, and we’ve just crossed the famous viaduct over the Bourne Rivulet (Where the Bright Waters Meet, for those of you who know their angling literature). You can clearly see the watercress beds, which for years have polluted the stream and degraded the invertebrate life – a classic example of an important local industry being allowed to impact the environment. The company involved has smartened its act recently, and the Rivulet is coming back, but the issue raises another dilemma – is any industry, local or national, so important or vital to human existence that it should be allowed to knacker the environment? We need to eat, so do we allow farming, which produces 70% of the diffuse pollution entering our waterways, to operate regardless of the effect it has on aquatic life?

So you see, it’s not just about catching fish. I’m not going into the issues any deeper – that’s all on the rest of the site – but talking about local and national takes me on to the recent opening of the Louds Mill fish pass on the River Frome in Dorset. Just as with the Bourne Rivulet, where locals (with a little national muscle from S&TA along the way) forced action to be taken, so it was local fisheries interests, in the shape of Frome and Piddle Fisheries Association, who fought long and hard to have the fish pass built. It ended up as a tremendous partnership between them and the Environment Agency, but without the determination of the locals, the pass would never have been built and the 25 kms of upstream habitat would have remained off-limits to migratory fish of all species (not just salmon and sea trout, but the resident trout, grayling and coarse fish which migrate within rivers and use fish passes.)

S&TA remains an organisation of game anglers and fisheries people seeking to influence national decision makers over the management and conservation of fish, water and the aquatic environment. We need to operate nationally, because that’s where the major decisions are taken that establish the structure inside which fisheries management and conservation has to operate. But I am very proud that we have such a good relationship with so many local groups and organisations, because it is in their rivers, streams and lakes that national policies are delivered alongside individual projects for their own particular circumstances. That’s the bit that we really have to get right, and it is up to the likes of us at S&TA to make sure national policies give locals the best possible opportunity of achieving their objectives.

I will write my next blog at the end of January, by which time we will have had an Angling Summit at the House of Commons with the Fisheries Minister, Huw Arancia-Davis.