May 26, 2913 - 200 Servings of Fish and Chips
 

http://cellar.org/2013/BIG-COD-2.jpg

This 103-pound cod caught off Norway by a German fisherman is to be donated to a Norwegian fishing museum. The last world record cod weighed 98 pounds.

Photos by Michael Eisele
From GrindTV

In honor of my son and hubby on a Boy Scout fishing/camping trip.

Where does the codpiece come from?

Norway.

Hang on, aren't cod over-fished and endangered?
I've never "got" fishing, really. Unless you eat it of course.

Give a man a fish and his family will eat for a day.
Give me a fish and I'll run away and eat it all myself.

I'm coming around to agree with you.

As a young man, I was interested in both hunting and fishing.
Then, hunting faded and I stayed interesting in fishing a long time.
More recently, my in fishing is fading away also.

My reasons have been:
If the hunter/fisherman says we are good for environment
because we want to protect the game for our sport,
then why do we target the biggest and best of the local species,
and pass by the smaller ones, or take more than we can eat. ?

... sort of like growing zucchini in PDX... there's so much you can't give it away. ;)

Which is a shame, because it doesn't grow as well down here, and I guarantee you we would take all the extra we could get. Zucchini, that is--I don't really like fish. Or fishing, for that matter.

Back home in Minnesota white-tail deer is our biggest hunting sport. And it is conservation by hunters that brought the deer from 300,000 in 1950 to more then 30 million today. They were so good at conservation that we have too many deer now.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6835501/ns.../#.UaTXo6vkvUZ

Yes, I don't know if it's still so, but in the 70's when I visited New Zealand,
there were government-hired hunters whose job was to shoot the (imported) deer
that were foraging in the (imported) pine/fir forests. :3_eyes:

When a hunter shoots the biggest specimens, it ensures the greatest continued genetic diversity in the species. Being older, the largest elk/moose/bear/deer, etc., have already passed on their genes, to several younger generations.

Think of it like milk stock in the store. The store wants you to always take the oldest dated milk - ensuring that the stock on hand will have the best chance of staying fresh.

The younger animals will cook up better, but continuing to hunt only them, over a long time, will cause the species to become less healthy.

I disagree.

Hunters have never set the laws for hunting. That is the bureaucracy of the state - which is always looking for more $$$.

Their normal mode is to increase license, supplies, tags, fuel, costs, etc., so they make more $$$ per hunter. Then, if they also increase the number of deer, and their distribution, they hope they can entice more hunters into the fields, every year.

This is not chump change for most states - it's hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only does each hunter pay a fee directly to the state, but each sporting goods dealer makes money, so each store also pays more in taxes, to the state.

What they forget, as liberals always seem to, is that if you raise the fees and taxes too much, the hunters find something else to do, besides going hunting.

The last thing liberals are thinking about is hunting license fees. It doesn't even register as a blip on the radar. Just sayin...

That depends on whether they are hunters, in a sporting goods business, or gun sales.

Don't forget the tourist industry

... if Fish and Wildlife don't produce big stags, the out-of-staters go elsewhere.

Then the guides, sports goods, restaurants, hotels, start lobbying
and the Dept of Commerce pays attention to them.

At least Montana is transparent about all this, and keep their out-of-state licenses very low.

Yes, trophy hunting is a whole other game, especially for western states. Here, deer hunting is more like a more vigorous trip to the meat store, half tradition, half recreation, which puts meat on the table. But for the guys that travel to deer camps, and hunt the game lands rather than their own back yard, it can be very expensive meat. :haha:

At least in Minnesota, that money that hunters pay goes directly to the DNR which funds conservation. The DNR does not collect from the General Fund taxes.

"“Most of what we do is funded by the anglers who buy licenses and stamps,” said Peterson. “The state’s General Fund does not pay for fish management. Legacy Amendment tax revenues have yet to contribute in a significant way, either."

http://news.dnr.state.mn.us/2011/05/...nse-dollar-go/