Combat Carp Hate with Burritos

by

Dagur Árni Gudmundsson

I’m sure most carp anglers in America have had to deal with their fair share of carp hating rhetoric. Most of it is ill informed, overblown, and ridiculous. None of it is very fun, which is why we fish, right?

One of the first times I fished a favorite lake of mine, the head county ranger of the park when hearing I was fly fishing for carp told me to “just throw the damn things on the bank and let them rot!”. For a variety of reasons, that was a very interesting conversation, not least for the fact that I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to kill fish just to let them rot on the bank, or at the very least morally and ethically just wrong. This rhetoric is also coming from the people getting paid by our tax dollars to protect the natural resources of the area. This is a lake inside county lands that doesn’t allow the hunting of highly invasive wild boar, but just killing carp for the sake of killing them is considered fine. On other occasions, I’ve had conversations with the rangers there where they had been talking about dynamiting the lake, to kill the carp and sell them to asia. Wild stuff, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg when dealing with public perception of carp here at home in the USA.

I live in California, where in most of our lakes, the majority of the fish species are non-native. The bass? Not native west of the continental divide. Channel catfish? Not native west of the continental divide. Brown trout? Not native to North America. All these fish are prized catches for one reason or another, yet carp get hated, disrespected, and treated as a pest.

The very thing that makes carp so awesome, their adaptability, their wide tolerance of water quality and temperatures, their ability to feed on a variety of food sources, also makes them the perfect scapegoat for many issues. For example, in California, we had an intense drought for many years, where the water levels of a lot of lakes and rivers dropped very low. This of course led to many issues with species like bass or trout that are vulnerable to these situations. Bass would spawn and the lake levels would recede to where the eggs were dry. Trout can’t survive in waters that have low oxygen and are warmer, so a lot of areas with trout were struggling while the lower water levels reduced the oxygen and increased the temperature. Not to mention, lower water levels means increased concentrations of pollutants from cities and agriculture that impact the water ways. So what do I hear from anglers, fish and game wardens, and people in communities around these areas? “The carp have killed off the bass fishing”, “carp have made the water so muddy nothing else can survive”, “the carp are eating all the trout eggs”, or “this lake is ruined because of the carp!”. Yeah, it definitely wasn’t the water pollution or the drought…

It seems to be so ingrained in the public view that carp are enemy #1, that they provide a really easy scapegoat for very complicated water issues. But what also gets me about the rhetoric around them, is simply the lack of respect towards a living creature. As anglers, we are the stewards of the resource, and whether you kill fish or not, there’s a certain level of respect that we should all have towards these animals living in our lakes and streams. If you kill fish, kill them quickly and take them home to eat. Killing something out of spite for it, or some misguided sense of protecting your bass fishery, is wrong. The idea that carp ruin native fisheries any more than a bass, which will specifically eat a diet consisting mostly of other fish, is also wrong. I can also name a lot of fisheries where brown trout have devastated a native trout population, yet I’m not seeing a lot of people advocating for going bowfishing for brown trout during the fall spawn.

Regardless of what the overall public perception of carp might be, I think it’s important to change the narrative, even just one person at a time. Once you show people how awesome these fish can be, most people are awed by them. It’s also funny to me when I talk about carp to people who don’t have these preconceptions about them. When I discuss carp with people from back home in Iceland, and they see them for what they are, an awesome target species to chase from an angling perspective, not the “trash fish that’s only good dead!”.

I love the feeling when you see the light in someone’s face when they first have an experience with carp that just ignites something in them. I see it all the time when I’m guiding people into their first carp, and it can be as little as just seeing one jump, or eating in the shallows. I remember when I first came to the states, and I fished a lake, no idea what I was doing or what I was targeting, and I saw these big golden beasts jumping and swimming around thinking “I want to catch that fish!” because why wouldn’t you want to catch the golden scaled beautiful fish that get huge?

Next time you find someone who hates carp, share a burrito and show them how cool they can be. Chances are they are just caught up in some generational narrative that these immigrant fish aren’t good enough for the American waters.