An Angler No More

I used to love fishing. I would travel all over my country to fish. I have fished in the irrigation canals of kampung rice fields, in the ditches of rubber smallholdings, in fish ponds, in large lakes, in disused mining pools or in the sea. I have done deep-sea fishing, too, travelling on simple fishing boats but not on yachts. I have never taken my family on any fishing outings.

However, I took my wife, my son and two daughters to a golf resort which had old mining pools, for fishing some years ago. We stayed in a chalet which was built over water at the edge of an old mining pool. My children used bread as bait while I used live small fish as bait.

My son managed to hook a huge carp while I caught nothing, so in the evening I put out a lot of lines by the edge of the mining pool and from the chalet. Every line had a small fish hooked on its back and hung circling on the surface of the water to attract large predator fish.

I read a book while eagerly waiting to hear the splash of water should a snake-head or other large fish attack the live bait. I waited for quite a while but heard nothing. I only heard my wife and my children telling me that I was being cruel to the small fish. They kept harping on it non-stop and asking me to release them.

Finally, I realized that I was actually being rather cruel so I took in the lines; unhooked the small fish and released them into the water. That was the day that I became imbued with ahimsa  -  the principle of non-injury to living things. I gave up fishing totally from that day onwards.

ltbs

Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Touch of Ahimsa

I was stung twice on the neck by bees when I was weeding a bean creeper under a jackfruit tree. I looked up and saw a beehive on one of the branches of the tree. Fortunately, I was not attacked by the swarm of the insects. A few of them just bombinated and buzzed around my head while the rest remained hanging on the hive.

The following day, I started pollarding that tree. I chopped off a few branches but making sure that the one with the hive hanging on it was left untouched. I kept a distance from that branch, too, for fear of being attacked should the bees be agitated by my pruning of the tree.

I decided to let the bees continue having that hive on the tree. I was not going to either kill them by spraying insecticide on them or to smoke them away.

My touch of ahimsa  -  the principle of non-injury to living things  -  was rewarded with a comb of honey after the bees flew away of their own accord a few days later. They must have found their hive uninhabitable due to the brightness of the sun after the cutting away of the branches of the tree.

ltbs

The behaviour of men to the lower animals, and their behaviour to each other, bear a constant relationship.
Herbert Spencer