Marcus Leroux
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The law on when it is legal to keep a fish you have caught is to be clarified because the coarse fishing industry estimates it is losing millions of pounds a year to poachers who either eat the fish or steal them to order for other fisheries.
Fishery owners now rate Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian poachers as the biggest threat facing their business. Of 60 fisheries across England and Wales questioned, 34 said they were regular victims of thefts and the problem had worsened in the past two years. Some 25 of them thought those responsible were immigrants removing the fish for the table.
Many fisheries fear that they are being targeted by gangs of professional thieves. Fisheries pay up to £400 for a 10kg (22lb) carp, and the heaviest varieties cost thousands of pounds.
Ian Welch, chairman of the Professional Coarse Fisheries Association, said: “Eastern Europeans just don’t understand the mindset where you check fish and put them back. Where we fish for sport, they tend to fish for food.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is drafting new regulations. It is theft to take fish from an enclosed body of water, but the law is unclear where lakes or ponds connect to the river network and stocks are protected by the convention that anglers fish solely for sport.
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The problem with the Eastern Europeans is that more often than not they fish without benefit of either Environment Agency rod licence or Riparian Owners permission. They are poachers; as such they are fish thieves, and should be treated accordingly.
I doubt that large fish such as the £400 carp mentioned are eaten: they are probably being sold on to other fisheries for a fraction of their worth.
For the rest of us who pay our dues, have the requisite permissions, and have no intention of reselling the catch, the currently-existing allowance of take-away fish should be retained. Some of us like to eat some freshwater fish.
Terry Dell, Weybridge, UK