Published: April 24, 2008 10:38 am            

The Outdoors: A couple of rotten anglers do a really rotten thing

Originally published in the April 18, 2008, print edition.

Growing older has its privileges.

And one of them is to develop a lower threshold of tolerance for some of the stupid, inconsiderate things that other people do.

Stupid things like running red lights or stop signs, able-bodied people parking in handicapped stalls to dash into a store, throwing trash out of car windows, shooting up traffic signs.

I don’t believe I’m being a curmudgeon in all of this. Not only are these transgressions inconsiderate. Frequently, they are as dangerous as well.

And if I were a bit more courageous, I might risk pointing out to the guilty parties what slugs they really are when I see them do such things.

But the same healthy, young person inclined to park in a handicapped stall probably would have no hesitation at punching a middle-aged guy right in the nose.

Nevertheless, there are some things some louts do that are so stupidly foolish that they deserve to be pointed out.

In recent weeks, there had been a pretty good last-ice crappie bite on Madison Lake. I’m not revealing any secrets. It was pretty common knowledge in fishing circles that a limit of the tasty panfish was no great shakes to catch.

Pretty much everyone who wished to could leave the lake with a limit of respectable-sized crappies.

Well, everyone except a couple of anglers. After going to the effort of catching a mess of fish on the popular lake, the miscreants apparently had second thoughts, deciding that cleaning a couple crappie limits along with a few bullheads, a perch and sunfish or two, would be too much work.

So a hundred yards away from the access, they simply tossed their catch on the ice where they rotted.

Now, in the big picture, considering how many hundreds of crappies were caught and taken home in the last weeks of the season from Madison Lake, then a couple of dozen crappies going to waste isn’t exactly the end of the world.

But I think such actions go beyond mere wanton waste or littering. Tossing the fish along the route that the rest of us took out to the fishing spot was a slap in the face of every other law-abiding, responsible angler who walked past them.

OK, so maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill out of a couple dozen wasted fish.

Then again, like many of you, I’m at a stage where I’ve grown pretty darned tired of making excuses and apologies for the slobs that make it tough for the rest of us who follow the rules.

        

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