F.e eating is considered godly by Christians, after all the apostles around Jesus were fishermen. Fishing is what the monks do during Lent. It became so closely associated with them that clerics promoting Christianity were called people-fishermen.
Is fishing hunting? At least some kind of hunt. Artificial fish ponds were already created in ancient times to make things easier for themselves. Nonetheless, in the second century AD, Oppian believed that hunting and catching birds were easier than catching fish.
Fishing also has a past as a pastime of the nobility and depictions of fish, women and men, which show that the nobility also understood fishing allegorically. The ruling princes saw it as a joke that ended in business, so they stipulated the minimum catch size of fish and the permitted dimensions of the net mesh. But professional fishermen have long been the poorest of the poor, as in the fairy tale of “Fischer un syn Fru”, a couple who live in a “piss pot” in a hut.
In winter they can be torrential
Fish has been caught the same way for thousands of years: with bare hands, with a hunting spear, with nets, fish traps or fishing rods. The fish swim, bears, cormorants and humans catch and eat them. Is that the whole story? At this point we have described the phenomenon of the green curtain. You are in nature, you don’t see a fox, a hare, or a deer, and yet you have to surely assume that the pigs are lying in this bramble bush, that the doe and the fawn are standing behind that edge of the forest. Is that scary? No! On the other hand, in waters where the bottom cannot be seen, many swimmers are afraid of what slips invisibly beneath them. Steven Spielberg plays with this primal fear in “Jaws” from 1975 and was the first to portray the monster in an animal horror film in an almost entirely realistic way. Moby-Dick’s second name is insidious. Ernest Hemingway’s fisherman Santiago fights a long battle with a barbed fish in “The Old Man and the Sea”, wins it and yet has none of his victory because the marlin that has been shot is gnawed off by predatory fish before the Cuban reaches the port.
On the shores of inland waters, this kind of horror and life-and-death struggle appears far away. Like the hunter in the area, the angler in the river is concerned with species conservation. On an average German low mountain range, 40,000 or 50,000 people live along its length. Five to six sewage treatment plants are in operation for them, the purified water of which is fed into the stream. Nevertheless, in the recently dry summers, such streams carried terrifyingly little water. In winter, on the other hand, they can become torrential and their whirlpools treacherous enough to drag down animals and people.
The sign that they want to spawn
Mountain rivers are so pure, fast flowing and rich in oxygen that they are bodies of water for the demanding ash trees. Low mountain streams are only barbel waters in terms of quality. Barbel and brown trout live in such rivers, and earlier also salmon.