I'm not angry at you for keeping fish, and I don't want to do away with keeping fish, especially in particular bodies of water. Limits aren't really a one size fits all thing. For example, slot limits are particularly effective at preserving a healthy, spawning adult population. Barbless and artificial only regulations greatly reduce the kill rate in heavily pressured waters. The rules that should apply vary by situation.
My argument is against this mentality:
There aren't always more where that one came from. It can take 10 to 20 years to grow a fish that big, and that's assuming it has the genes, luck, and food sources to achieve that. Removing that huge fish now only undoes that 20 years it took to grow, but it removes the large fish genes from the pool.
Also, fishing out a body can happen rather rapidly. This may not apply so much to catfish or bass, but trout come to mind. Sure, a hatchery can continuously stock fish so people have something to catch. However, these stocked fish leave much to desire. They are dumb, having been raised in an environment that encourages gorging on any and all food that floats by. They are ugly, often missing fins from rubbing on the concrete raceways. They lack color due to living in a concrete ditch. They taste bad because of the ingredients in the hatchery food. It takes about a year of living away from the hatchery for a fish to become "wild". The wild fish are vastly superior in sporting terms. They are more selective, fight harder, and are prettier.
For example, starting in mid to late March, the family vacation crowd arrives in droves to Beavers Bend State Park in SE Oklahoma. Every mom, pop, and child want to go get their limit every day they are there. This is no problem, as these fresh fish are absolute suckers for Power Bait. A single family of four takes 5 fish each for of the 3 days they are there. That's 60 fish PER FAMILY. How many families are there? Hundreds. THOUSANDS of fish are harvested per week from March until school starts again in late August or September. The fish get harvested, the state plops several thousand back in and at the end of the season the river is full of "rubber" stockers again. By the time spring rolls around and the fish have started to gain a small foothold, the meat harvest starts up again. The population never has a chance to catch on so the whole thing becomes this artificially maintained subpar fishing experience. That's why I concern myself with fish limits.
Now maybe this doesn't happen so much with the warmwater species, but overharvesting of fish can happen remarkably fast and we are left with an inferior situation for enjoying fishing.
The state, which is generally in charge of managing the stocking of public waters, doesn't necessarily care about the quality of a fishery or the experience of fishing. They simply observe raw numbers and concern themselves with revenue generation through tourism and fishing licenses. It's a real battle to try to reason with them in this way for fishery preservation.
Once again, the rules are the rules and if you take fish that you are allowed to, then that's that. Just remember that every fish you take out can't reproduce and create more fish and it can't be caught again. There aren't always "more where that came from."
Does that make sense as to why I concern myself with this?
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