Chumming ethics.

[Quillback]

52 minutes ago, MoCarp said:

people will do many things for money..ethical or otherwise....from getting a bass from a live box on a dock on TR to win big fish....to taking WAY over their limit to get their "moneys worth"....they can ban corn chumming, yet you can count on it still happening....just like deer shot from the road with a spot light....

I caught my 1st trout on a fly.....have a bucket list of many things angling I hope to try.......once people fish for the fun and not for dinner things will change....we are closer to that today than 15 years ago..but have a ways to go

I thing its a waste to arrow a 30# common and toss it into a dumpster at the ramp.....many are ok with that...I think its not cool to put a knife to a 3# smallie.....is it legal? for now yes....to think a put and take fishery is "natural" we are just fooling ourselves...if a guide is chumming corn I am tossing a corn fly......yellow jig etc....western trout streams are a good way to spend ones retirement.....

Well  I can't control other people or what they do, but I have my own set of ethics, or maybe standards, when it comes to fishing, and just about all the people I fish with do also.  Personally I would not fish near a guide or anyone else that is ladling corn into the water, I'll go home skunked before I do that.  Not that I want to spoil anyone else's fun, if chumming up a limit (assuming it is legal, some states it is not), floats your boat, have at it.

[Old plug]

I do not truly chum I may throw a few whole ones in the water now ne then. I  do not take anymore than I think I will use. most times this is a about 2-3 dozen max. I hook them thru the eye with the hook on a spoon. I try to use them while they are fresh. The longer they are dead the less effective they are for atuff like Hybrids.

quillback ... I have 2 fishing friends.One is a vert good crappie fisherman the other is all About catching all hecan and cleaning  them. I do not  like the second friends  fishing 

[Trout Addict]

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[fshndoug]

Laker,I know what you have in your pockets,your hand,haha!

[Gavin]

Some of the Arkansas meat head guides like to chum. Legal there, but still a retarded practice. It is not hard to catch a stocker rainbow trout most of the time. Have grabbed a few bare handed to amuse the kids. Tap your finger tips on the water and a dumb one might swim right to you;)!

[laker67]

21 hours ago, fshndoug said:

Laker,I know what you have in your pockets,your hand,haha!

thats why my fingers are sticky

[Champ188]

Anyone who would handle a maggot --- as chum or actual bait --- is a lot madder at those trout than I am.  

As for meathead guides, they aren't exclusive to Arkansas. I personally know of one Missouri hillbilly guide on Table Rock who frequently fillets smallmouth and post photos of them laying on a cleaning table on Facebook. 

[Seth]

There was a boat anchored up just above Short Creek on the shallow side earlier this year when I was down at Taneycomo that was slinging corn all over the place. There was five or six people in the boat, all bait fishing, bringing trout in left and right. I left to fish another spot and came back a few hours later and they were still sitting there. Hard telling how many trout they caught that day. Being that they were using bait, I can imagine that a lot of them swallowed the hooks too. I bet a guy could have drowned some crawlers there and caught a few suckers too.

Speaking of chumming, my mom and dad went on a guided catfishing trip to Lake of the Ozarks with Chris Jones this past summer. Chris was using the heads of shad for bait and tossing the back of back in to the water. One of the catfish that they caught and cleaned was extra fat and we found out why when it was cleaned later on. It was plum full of those shad tails! It must have sat under the boat gorging on those things for hours before it swam back and found one of the heads with a hook in it.

[snagged in outlet 3]

I watched a guide boat in front of Gene's dock chumming with corn out of a 5 gallon bucket!!!

[tjm]

Ethics  is like religion or politics in that it varies with occasion and the people involved. A very twisted and convoluted branch of philosophy. I think there is no action that can not be shown to be ethical under some one of the systems of ethics.

Chumming for fish is exactly the same as chumming for deer and both are time honored traditions in some places and among some people.

I think ethics of chumming is like ethics of catch and release or ethics of gill netting gamefish, it exists only in the eye of the beholder. It depends only on the time and place. Any action can be justified or condemned by one religion or another. So we are left to look at the legality of it and say if it is legal it is legal. We could attempt to change the legality of one action or another, but then we may be infringing of others "natural rights" .  Some us would probably think bass tournaments are ethical, I don't. Some seem to think  that eating a bass in unethical, I just think there are tasting fish, others think it is the highest and best use of a god given resource.Is it ethical for me to restrict your natural right to eat a crappie? Or a hamburger? A vegan might say "yes", not only ethical but of great benefit to the universe.

Is using a paid guide ethical? Isn't that akin to buying your fish or game? Didn't the custom of tipping a guide come from the thought that paid guides was unethical? Is there a difference between paying a guide to put you over fish with electronics and paying the same guide to put the fish under you with chum?

Corn may not hurt trout and maybe they can digest some corn, but I have seen days on small streams that had trout with swollen bellies floating belly up or laying upside down on the bottom, and cut open half a dozen to find them with nothing in their digestive tract except yellow corn. One fishery biologist, when I reported it said unequivocally that whole corn could not pass through a trout, said he also thought it created a chemical reaction/imbalance or something like that, fermentation maybe, I forget, long time passing.The fact that they are chumming that heavy and the trout are not dying is most encouraging.