More-than-human encounters with fish in the City: from careful angling practice to deadly indifference

Abstract

Angling is an immensely significant leisure practice that provides an important window onto the variable and selective ways humans value animals, and on how humans and animals variously affect each other’s lives. Through a novel ethnography of coarse angling practice, this paper focuses on the simultaneity of coarse fish as victims of human play and as biosocial actors with considerable affective power above and below water. We posit that paying close attention to the embodied and performative contexts of catching and caring for fish for leisure reveals deeply rooted passions and paradoxes that raise questions not only about angling but about the stark injustices within the spectrum of human-fish encounters. We conclude by asking whether angling should be consigned to history or whether anglers are important socio-ecological practitioners that could and should do more to challenge the cruelties and injustices within human-fish relations.