The Secret Angler

Picture the following scenes. You are just below a lovely stone bridge on a sunny morning, the slow water at the edge of the pool has trout cruising around picking off insects that drop from the overhanging tree, and you are making ready to cast. Then across the bridge comes a man yapping into his mobile phone with three dogs doing their own yapping. Still gabbing on the phone the man and the dogs go to the water where he throws a ball from one of those throwing sticks into the river. Fortunately all this commotion happens above the bridge but it breaks the peace of a morning’s fly fishing.

In the second scene our fly angler is keeping low on the bank and casting to trout rising in the slick water at the tail of a pool. A sudden racket from behind turns out to be a pooch leaping into the river. The last gloomy example of idyll-breaking is the fisherman tackling down, a fly at the end of the line waving in the wind, when along comes a man and his dog which spontaneously decides to jump up a wader and risk getting a hook in its stupid head. The angler guides the dog away with his foot and the owner complains about his pet being kicked. ‘You’ll make it nervous.’

Well, dear reader, you will have guessed these incidents all happened to me, along with a great many others involving ‘man’s best friend.’ It seems to be a common hazard that all anglers face when out fishing, even where there is no public access. The great dog-loving British public are happy to take any opportunity to encourage their mutts into rivers, shit all over the bank and generally harass those of us who would prefer to go about their business without such interruptions.

Dog owners often like to call their pets intelligent: ‘Fido’s awfully intelligent you know.’ I’m inclined to think this a form of self-flattery. They, being aware that humans are regarded as a form of life higher up the evolutionary scale than a dog, must believe that their own intelligence is therefore exceptional. When you watch a dog walker chucking rocks in the river while their hapless pooches stand in the water looking completely bemused you have to wonder about this.

Dogs and fishing rarely mix but this doesn’t stop some anglers taking their own dogs along to the riverbank. There is even an article about the best fishing dogs, though the conclusion seems to be there is no such thing. I remember a river keeper lamenting the number of dogs taken to the stretch he cared for, where they crapped liberally in the long grass. Come time to strim the footpaths the consequent shower was unwelcome. Well trained dogs are rarer than the Mongolian Noshit breed. Mention training to dog fanciers and they think you’re referring to public transport.

Numbers of dogs are on the rise. In 2019 there were just under ten million. Now that figure has gone up by over a million; 29% of the population have one or more. Aside from the shocking attacks on people, thankfully rare, these animals do a lot of environmental damage. Their excretions enrich areas of grassland to the detriment of wild flowers. In the river they damage spawning areas, wear down banks and even introduce highly poisonous pesticides after flea treatment. The river keeper at the Wilton Club on the River Wylye has had some success in persuading dog walkers to keep them on dry land. And you will still find dog shit on the pavements, though campaigns to stop that have had some success. Years ago I used to visit Brighton where the pavements were paved not with gold but brown. Better nowadays.

Is there anything good to say for dogs? Well, there are some very useful ones, not for angling but shooting. You can’t spend all day looking for the pheasants you’ve bagged so a retriever is a handy thing, provided the fleabag doesn’t start eating the bird. More valuable are guide dogs for those with impaired sight, invariably delightful animals with peaceful temperaments. You’ll never get one of those barking in your face and leaping up at you. And lonely old people find their pets a solace, an indictment of society more than a vote for canine company in my view. Something that surprised me is that, according to an Environment Agency officer, many pollution reports come from dog walkers, not just anglers.

So maybe we can grudgingly put up with them, especially if owners keep the damn things out of the water where I’m fishing. One might wonder how dogs came to be domesticated in the first place. Did ancient man need something to pat on the head beside the fire of an evening? According to the latest thinking, dogs domesticated themselves. They recognised a free meal ticket when they saw it. Perhaps they really are more intelligent than their owners.

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Some years ago at one of the periodic riverfly conferences, the late Peter Lapsley wondered when something would get done with all the fly survey data collected. He couldn’t see much point for volunteers to spend hours sampling rivers and conferences to talk all about it unless something useful was going to come of it. The Riverfly Partnership coordinates all this now; whether they are doing something useful is a matter for discussion, but that deserves a post of its own.

Get togethers for long-winded and possibly ineffectual chinwags on the state of trout rivers are fairly widespread these days. The latest grandly billed  itself as the first UK River Summit, overlooking the many more modestly titled ones held over the years — I’ve even been to one or two myself. Unpromisingly it was organised by a PR firm, the head of which happens to go fishing. Whether the speakers, which included someone from the Angling Trust, Wildfish and Fish Legal, had anything fresh to say will have to wait until the proceedings are published, if indeed they are. No doubt they will have enjoyed their ‘wild food riverside lunch’ — ‘I must be fed’. Not wild trout I trust.

More promising was ‘Owned by everyone? The wonder, plight and future of chalk streams’, hosted by The Cambridge Conservation Initiative. Anglers like a bit of nostalgia and romance, which is perhaps why this talking shop began with a bit of Ted Hughes, his poetry and fishing life and general hand-wringing for what we’ve lost even in the few years since his death. This was followed by the state of the chalk streams, lots of nice pictures followed by dry river beds and a slide on the cheapness of water. Yep, we use too much, therefore.

To relieve the academic stuff, there are presentations on fish filming and drawing, but none of these is going to restore the rivers. Within the lengthy talks — I haven’t listened to them all the way through — there are interesting observations and information amongst the painting and poetry, but much of it we already know. We know the chalk streams and all British rivers are polluted by agriculture and sewage discharge. We know they are heavily abstracted. So we know what to do, as Charles Rangeley-Wilson notes to his credit. He is the person who has embarked on the novel project to restore the River Nar to something like its original state. He is a fan of strategies for environment restoration because that is the way to do things most efficiently. That is true, yet we know that, for example, water metering will reduce water usage by about 20%, investment by water companies will save water and stop sewage discharges.

Rangeley-Wilson thinks it can be done. It can, but political will is needed, and while we are preparing strategies and holding talking shops, things are steadily getting worse.

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