This is morally offensive and will hurt all who love our sport

PART of Scottish salmon fishing folklore is the record 64lb salmon Georgina Ballantine caught, with her father at the oars, on the River Tay on October 7, 1922. It is a curious thing that had the Government’s apparent wish been in place for banning all salmon anglers from killing what they catch, 100 years ago, we would never have known what that mighty beast weighed.

Unlike their so-called coarse fish cousins, salmon cannot survive exposure to air for more than a few seconds, so that weighing them accurately is pretty much impossible unless they are dead.

The current debate in the world of salmon fishing is raising temperatures, not something one normally associates with the gentle and noble art. It is not so much the fact of catch and release – most river anglers voluntarily release more than 90 per cent already – it is the fact of compulsion, of it becoming illegal to kill a salmon to take home to eat, which is sticking in fishers’ throats.

There are morally offensive consequences of compulsion. Should you really be going fishing if you know that anything you catch will have to go back in the water? Inevitably in the process of catching a salmon, between 1 per cent and 3 per cent die, or are bleeding so badly that there is no hope of recovery.

Other than providing free otter food, is there not something morally offensive about putting back in the river a salmon that is already dead?

The Government’s interest in this has been sparked by some alarming figures, with environmental sages such as Sir David Attenborough warning that the Atlantic salmon is under imminent existential threat.

Figures for salmon numbers are at best estimates, but headlines include there being ten million in the whole North Atlantic 60 years ago, now maybe reduced to 1.5 million. Of those returning to Scottish rivers, there were some 1.5 million 60 years ago, now as few as 300,000. The urgency to try to do something about it is understandable.

It is not the Government’s motives that are being questioned, it is more whether banning killing will make any difference, while possibly deterring those who would fish and thereby provide a vital life blood to many Scottish rural communities.

I caught a salmon last week. She would have been born somewhere upstream of Peebles. As I extracted the hook from her mouth, I marvelled at this wonderful creature, probably four years old, having spent two years in the river before migrating downstream through Berwick harbour and off into the sea to mature and grow, over the next two years, into the 14lb survivor of a marathon, epic journey, all the way to Greenland and back.

Her only purpose in coming back to where I could catch her is to go upstream and lay her eggs, just as her mother did for her four years ago, to keep the species going.

Not for one minute did it occur to me to kill her to take home to eat. If it is cruel to catch them, I convince myself it is only people like me, and the money we produce to go fishing, that keep these wonderful creatures going.

HOWEVER, the Government has been complicit in the demise of so many wonderful salmon and sea trout rivers and lochs on the West Coast thanks to the damaging effects of the burgeoning salmon farming industry. If proof were needed that it is only anglers that care about salmon, and the general public do not, why is it that millions of farmed salmon die of disease and are disposed of every year, and yet there is no public outcry?

Forcing anglers to do something they are voluntarily doing anyway, and increasingly so, will achieve nothing – except annoy those who really care. People like me.