A new story by John Zimmerman, "A Lesson in Life at the End of the Rainbow," details the harrowing moment with a beautiful rainbow trout that made him stop fishing for good. READ NOW!
Here's a quick excerpt...
I didn’t want it to die. Him to die?
I had never felt that way about the hundreds of other fish I had caught throughout my life.
Not the first time, when I was a lad at Fish-A-While Lake snuffing out the life of a sunfish at the end of a bamboo pole.
Not when my friends and I would nail freshly caught catfish to a nearby tree, thrust a knife into their heads, strip off their flesh with a pair of pliers, and then gut them and cook them over the campfire. I never for a second considered the immense pain the fishes must have felt—pain that we inflicted upon them.
Not when I brought home a stringer of Lake Michigan perch for a fish fry. Not when I caught my limit of coho from the same lake, to be eaten the next day after my mom soaked their fileted orange-red flesh in milk overnight to dampen the salmon’s strong flavor.
Nor did I care about the three other rainbow trout I caught just weeks before at the very same lake. But fearing for the suffering of the rainbow trout in front of me now, I found myself screaming, “Die already!”