(World) This efficient but unselective way of killing animals is called trawling

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opinion.telegraph.co.uk

By Charles Clover

(Filed: 01/07/2004)

 

Imagine what those animal welfare people would say if a band of

hunters strung a mile of net between two vast all-terrain vehicles

and dragged it across the plains of Africa. This fantastical

assemblage, like something from a Mad Max movie, would scoop up

everything in its way: lions, cheetahs, elephants, rhinos, impala,

wildebeest and wild dogs. Only the smallest juveniles would be able

to wriggle through the mesh.

 

The effect of dragging a net with an iron bar across its mouth across

the plains is to break off every outcrop and uproot every bush,

stirring columns of birds into the air. Left behind is a landscape

like a harrowed field. The industrial hunter-gatherers stop to

examine the tangled mess of writhing or dead creatures behind them.

Some are too small, too mangled, or the wrong species. These are

dumped on the plain to be consumed by carrion.

This efficient but unselective way of killing animals is called

trawling. It is practised the world over each day, from the Barents

Sea to the shores of Antarctica, and from the tropical waters of the

Indian Ocean to Cape Cod.

 

Yet, because what fishermen do is obscured by a veil of water and

because fish are cold-blooded rather than cuddly, most people think

of what happens at sea differently from what happens on land.

 

 

 

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