I think fishing at an early age helped me situate my worldviews in its own way. I was the sort of kid who hated baiting the worm on the hook - why am I making this thing squirm just to drown it? Why am I gouging a fish's mouth trying to get the hook out? Nothing like spending ages unhooking a dying fish just to watch it slowly sink back into the depths to traumatize a 7 year old and set them on the path of radical empathy.

In recent years I've gotten back into fishing. I don't eat seafood at all - 20% of that is morals, fully 80% is I don't like the taste - but it's relaxing to just sit and cast, and exciting to get something on the line. The grim fact is I love the aesthetics of it: whole-baked fish in newspaper, 40s magazine ads of dudes pulling up brook tout, the materials of fly tying, Hemingway in Pamplona chilling a bottle of red wine in the river. You could catch a real trophy with my brainworms as bait.

I debarb all my hooks, I change my treble hooks to singles, I don't use bait, I release ASAP and won't take trophy pics, I won't fish in the fall when they're fattening up for winter. I'm an awful fisherman and rarely catch anything, which helps. Like others have said the actual fishing is incidental, and chilling by the water is a successful day. But I entirely understand and will never resent anyone taking issue with the cruelty of it - I largely agree.