SPORT OR UTILITY?

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 306, 26 December 1936, Page 8

SPORT OR UTILITY?

INANGA V. TROUT.

Discussions oil sport give us a healthy diversity of views, especially where it is sport with rod and line. English colonels and majors and other confirmed anglers are often rather scornful of our free-and-easy colonial ways in the catching of trout, which, in the British tradition, is a sacred fish not to be taken except in the manner accepted in the best sport circles of the older lands. One of them strongly objects to trolling for trout at Taupo; he considers it is just about the bally limit. The expert fly-fisher, of course, never has any tolerance for the non-expert, who just goes out on his brief holiday to get a trout, in tl\e most convenient way. The solemn methods of the leisured angler who spends weeks—one has known them spend months —in whipping streams are not for him. To some of us it really does not matter how we catch fish so long as we get it. We'd just as soon eat a trout caught in a Maori eelpot as on the fly-fisher's hook; the main thing is to get a trout worth the eating. " Trout a Pest." Now a Southern man, a member of the Canterbury Education Board, has risen to protest against excessive trout worship on the part of the acclimatisation societies. He complains that the greedy trout have almost exterminated inanga, or whitebait, in the rivers of the West Coast, and that these sacrosanct trout are really as much a pest as stoats and weasels. The inanga used to keep a large industry going on the AVest Coast, but now it has dwindled to very small proportions. This is exactly the Maori point of view. The Arawa people and other tribes whose waters once teemed with whitebait and koura crayfish, greatly preferred their native fish to the trout. There was a time when the waters of Rotorua and other lakes were more valuable than the land, for the inanga and koura and other small fish, were in enormous quantities. Under the arrangement made with the Government some years ago the people of Rotorua and the Taupo district gave up their hereditary rights to control the fishing in their lakes. One lake, Rotoaira, is reserved strictly for the Maoris; it was surreptitiously stocked with trout, greatly to the annoyance of the Maoris, who eomplf.i'ii that their supplies of the little fish koaro (which issues from the spring on the north and west shores of the lake, like similar small sightless fish in Uamurana Spring at Rotorua) are devoured by the unwanted trout. Everyone to his taste. Many of us, pakelia as well as Maori, consider freshly netted inanga a greater delicacy than trout." At any rate, the whitebait furnish numbers of people of both races with a living, and it is just as well that the question of the relative values of the two should have been raised. " Catch What You Need" Principle. The regulations concerning trout-fishing ;eem to follow rather too slavishly the English rules. They could very well be liberalised here to suit the different conditions. Why on earth shouldn't anyone use a luiliu or a cricket or any other live bait to take a trout or an eel or any other fish? The main thing is, get your fish. ' The Maori point of view is eminently sensible. He catches fish for food, and wonders at the English angler who spends long hours and days in hauling in trout that he does not need. That same principle, catch only what you need, was applied to his birdsnaring and spearing, with the result that the forests always supplied him with food, in never-dimiliishing quantity, until the destroying white man came to upset completely the healthy ancient way. —J.C.