If egg prices surge this winter, one of the main drivers will likely be H5N1, or bird flu.

Since 2022, it’s decimated the US poultry industry, resulting in the deaths of over 160 million egg-laying hens.  

And when there are fewer hens, there are fewer eggs, which leads to shortages and price hikes. This happened in early 2023 when avian flu was circulating: Egg prices increased by 65 percent compared to a few months prior, and in 2025, it happened again, reaching a national average of more than $6 per dozen. (There’s also some evidence, per a Justice Department investigation, that suggests major egg companies may have colluded to raise prices, too.)

We have the tools to slow the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) without such high mortality, though; the United States has several effective bird flu vaccines, and egg (and turkey) producers want to use them on their birds.

Last year, it seemed like they soon might be able to. In early 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would begin formulating a plan for potential vaccination by engaging with trade partners, state veterinarians, farmers, and other stakeholders. But according to reporting in Politico last week, that plan is now stalled. Why? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaccine agenda appear partly to blame.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “pulled back on an internal USDA strategy for vaccinating poultry and egg-laying hens,” according to Politico, because she was “concerned about whether it would clash with [RFK Jr.’s] anti-vaccine views.” The pause, according to the story, “went against the counsel of expert agency staff.”

The USDA didn’t respond to detailed questions for this story. “USDA has been fully committed to providing the most robust response to battling HPAI,” a spokesperson wrote over email. 

Kennedy oversees the Food and Drug Administration, which has some jurisdiction over what happens on farms, though the USDA manages disease outbreaks. But he and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement apparently have enough political influence to sway how the agriculture department manages this multiyear outbreak — the largest in US history. It is risky for the birds, and consumers, and could mean that we’re going to continue to fight this devastating disease without perhaps the most effective tool to slow it down. 

Why we don’t vaccinate poultry birds

Just as influenza circulates in humans, H5N1 is also largely seasonal; around this time of year as ducks and geese migrate south for the winter, they shed the virus near farms. And once it infects one bird in a packed poultry barn, it quickly tears through the flock. 

When birds die from the bird flu, it’s an excruciating death. However, most birds don’t die from the disease itself but rather from efforts to stop its spread. Per federal regulations, as soon as H5N1 is detected in a barn, poultry producers must cull every bird, and that culling is brutal. The predominant method entails producers sealing off the vents, which causes temperatures to rise and slowly subject the birds to death via heatstroke.

Many turkey and egg producers do want to vaccinate their birds (tens of millions of turkeys have also died due to H5N1 and resulting culling since 2022), and there are several vaccines that the USDA has deemed safe and effective. But the agency won’t allow egg and turkey producers to use them because doing so could hurt the chicken meat industry.

Chickens raised for meat, known as broiler chickens, are much less likely to become infected with the virus, and the US industry exports 13.9 percent of what it produces, valued at $6.2 billion last year. And as I wrote last year:

Most of the countries that import American chicken meat would pause those imports if any farmed birds in the US are vaccinated, even if no chickens raised for meat are vaccinated. The reason behind these blanket bans stems from importing countries’ concerns around the so-called “DIVA” problem, which is short for “differentiating infected from vaccinated animals.” It represents the challenge of identifying whether a poultry bird is infected with bird flu or simply has avian influenza antibodies from vaccination.

In other words, the chicken meat industry has little to gain from vaccination and a lot to lose. It’s also bigger and more politically powerful than the turkey and egg sectors (two of the largest chicken meat companies — Pilgrim’s Pride and Mountaire — happen to be major Trump donors). 

Experts say that these trade problems can be solved by increasing disease surveillance and testing. In 2023, French duck farmers began vaccinating birds against H5N1. The US and Canada restricted imports for over a year, but partially lifted the restrictions after they were assured they didn’t pose a biosecurity risk. 

Now, on top of resistance from the chicken meat industry, there’s Kennedy’s anti-vaccine influence. 

I asked Carol Cardona, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine and a proponent of vaccinating poultry birds, what she made of the Trump administration’s about-face on its vaccine plan.

She quoted the historian John Barry: “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”

The US is losing the war on bird flu, and vaccines could help

Given the chicken meat industry’s outsized influence on the vaccination debate, Kennedy’s position may not exert the largest push here. But it certainly hasn’t helped speed the rollout of vaccines, adding one more barrier to what many poultry veterinarians and infectious disease experts say is common sense. 

HHS didn’t respond to a list of questions for this story about Kennedy’s opposition to vaccinating poultry birds. “Decisions about vaccine development and deployment must be guided by rigorous science, including evidence of safety, effectiveness against circulating strains, and the implications for animal and human health,” a spokesperson wrote, though didn’t outline any concerns over safety or effectiveness and didn’t respond to follow-up questions.

“With migratory bird season here, our goals and policy have not changed: detecting, controlling, and containing HPAI in consultation with partners across the country continues each day,” a USDA spokesperson wrote to Vox. 

The control and containment largely amounts to culling birds when H5N1 is detected on farms, and paying farms to improve their biosecurity by compensating them for things like repairs, rodent control, handwashing stations, and wild bird repellents. 

But according to Cardona, this just isn’t working. “When biosecurity breaks over and over and over again, you have to say to yourself, there’s something wrong with the system,” Cardona told me. She said a vaccination plan should focus on the most valuable and vulnerable species — egg-laying hens and turkeys used for breeding — and in the northern half of the US, where infection rates are much higher. 

With vaccination, Cardona said, “we reduce the amount of virus in the environment, and so by doing that, we reduce the number of other species that get infected. We simply reduce, reduce, reduce.”

Vaccination wouldn’t be cheap, and it could affect chicken meat exports. But chicken meat producers are “not the only stakeholders,” Cardona said, adding that regulators ought to look at the full damage that the bird flu has wrought.

There’s the rise in cost to consumers who buy eggs, and the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to compensate farmers for the culled birds. Then there’s the human toll: 72 people in the US have contracted the virus since 2024, and nearly all were poultry and dairy workers; two died. (While the odds remain low, many scientists also fear bird flu could spark the next human pandemic.) 

For decades, bird flu mostly just infected birds. But the toll on wildlife since 2021 has been immense, including mass die-offs of sea lions in Peru and seal pups on Antarctic islands. In 2024, the virus was first detected in dairy cattle and has now affected nearly 1,200 herds; one study of an Ohio dairy found that each infected cow cost the farmer about $950 in lost profits. 

Finally, there’s the moral cost of slowly, painfully killing hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens and turkeys.

But as Cardona pointed out, bird flu, like politics, is seasonal. The Biden administration, arguably, slow-walked vaccine development and deployment until the Trump administration inherited the issue. 

If egg prices do rise this winter, it likely won’t happen until well after midterms, meaning neither party will pay much of a political price for higher food costs. The costs of bird flu, instead, will be paid by consumers, vulnerable farmworkers, and most of all, the birds themselves.

In November, voters in Washington, DC, and Denver will cast their ballots to decide whether their cities’ restaurants and grocery stores can continue to sell one of the world’s more controversial foods: foie gras.

French for “fatty liver,” foie gras is made by briefly force-feeding ducks a corn slurry two to three times daily with a metal tube during the final two to three weeks of their lives. It can make their livers balloon to roughly six to 10 times their natural size.

The farming practice gives the liver its signature rich, buttery taste that made it a French delicacy centuries ago and ever since, a prized menu item at upscale restaurants, particularly in Europe, the United States, and East Asia. But the apparent cruelty of force-feeding ducks has also long made it the target of those concerned with animal welfare.

While forcing a lot of food through a metal tube into ducks’ throats may not look great, foie gras companies and high-end chefs contend that it doesn’t hurt the animals because — among other reasons — ducks’ unique physiology enables them to eat fish and other animals whole, and that they naturally gorge before migrations. (More on these arguments later).

Whenever the issue is up for a vote, it touches off fierce debates over animal welfare and fine dining. While foie gras production does harm animals, producers and chefs maintain the dish is unfairly singled out when there are arguably worse practices in animal agriculture, including many that impact a far greater number of animals. Banning a product largely consumed by the 1 percent might make some voters feel good, while ignoring the animal cruelty embedded in the production of vastly more common products, like chicken and eggs.

But to animal rights advocates, a potential ban in DC — which has more foie gras-serving restaurants than almost anywhere else in the US — represents a unique opportunity to hasten the end of what spokesperson Natalie Fulton of Pro-Animal DC, the group behind the DC ballot measure, calls a “uniquely cruel” practice.

What the science says about force-feeding ducks

Foie gras producers often argue that ducks can handle force-feeding just fine because of their long, flexible necks that allow them to swallow fish whole — spines and all — and that they’ve evolved to stuff themselves before seasonal migrations. Producers also commonly say that they have no gag reflex. 

But these claims, according to research, don’t mean that force-feeding is painless. They also leave out a lot of the other problems in foie gras production. Last month, a veterinarian at Ghent University in Belgium and a team of animal welfare research consultants published a literature review in the journal Animals looking at how foie gras farming affects ducks. 

For one, there’s a big difference between ducks swallowing fish and having a rigid metal tube inserted into their throat dozens of times. A duck’s throat and beak area are particularly sensitive, and repeated insertion can cause tissue damage and irritation and inflammation in their esophagus, according to the newly published research, which was funded by the Flemish government. And while wild waterfowl might gorge before migrations, the resulting liver enlargement in the wild doesn’t come anywhere near what it does on foie gras farms. 

Beyond the arguments as to whether ducks can be humanely force-fed, there are plenty of other welfare concerns in foie gras production. Eating so much makes the ducks overweight, which makes it harder for them to move around. Liver enlargement increases their internal heat production, which can make ducks pant more, and an enlarged liver can put pressure on their air sacs, also making it harder to breathe. 

“The available evidence indicates that force-feeding creates substantial risks of welfare compromise through repeated restraint and tube insertion, possible injuries to the upper digestive tract, progressive liver enlargement, altered hepatic [liver] function, increased metabolic heat load, and impaired mobility,” the researchers concluded.

Ducks raised for foie gras aren’t given access to water — like a pond or bathing trough — which in nature they use to clean themselves and forage. And the overwhelming majority of those reared in the US even lack access to the outdoors. 

Despite some of the documented welfare concerns in foie gras farming, Jordan Ginor — a director at Hudson Valley Farms in upstate New York — told me that they’ve got “really good, clean, smiley, healthy ducks.” The company is one of the two main commercial foie gras producers in the US and raises hundreds of thousands of ducks for foie gras annually.

Ginor also said that the aforementioned literature review focuses on European foie gras production, where birds are typically force-fed larger meals, twice daily, over two weeks. But at Hudson Valleys Farms, he said, the process is slower: smaller meals, thrice daily, over three weeks. “The slow process, with significantly less food per meal, lessens any possibility of stress or negative impacts,” he said. (Though one could argue that more insertions over a longer period is worse for the ducks.)

Earlier this year, a photojournalist who took a public tour of Hudson Valley Farms documented — during the force-feeding phase — ducks confined in small pens with no bedding. In one part of the video, the ducks gather in the corner of the pen, seemingly in a fruitless attempt to escape force-feeding.

When I asked Ginor for a response to the video, he was dismissive of the investigations into his company. “We’re proud of what we do,” he said. “Anyone’s welcome to go in and see.” (To its credit, the company provides free public tours, which is highly unusual for large-scale meat producers.)

In previous investigations of the company, animal advocates alleged they documented ducks injured, lame, bloodied, heavily panting, overcrowded in large barns, and confined in small cages prior to slaughter. 

The other main commercial US farm, La Belle Farm, also in upstate New York, did not respond to an interview request for this story. La Belle has received far less attention than Hudson Valley Farms, though a 2019 news story found that its housing and practices are similar to those of its counterpart.

Why single out foie gras?

Support for a foie gras ban neared 80 percent in a small 2023 poll of Washington, DC, residents, with similar support in a 2026 Denver poll. 

“We’ve tried to diversify, given everything that’s been going on” with foie gras bans over the last 20-odd years, Ginor told me. But foie gras is still the core of Hudson Valley Farms’ business.

Ginor said his operation is more humane than a lot of other poultry farms, so why single out foie gras? “As soon as we start comparing how things work at other farms, we look much more favorably,” he told me.

He may have a point, though it’d be difficult to crunch the moral math and determine whether foie gras is much worse — or perhaps even not as bad — as the factory farming of America’s chickens, egg-laying hens, and turkeys. Around half of US egg-laying hens live in tiny cages, while turkeys and chickens raised for meat have been bred to grow so big and fast that they have difficulty walking. And they all outnumber foie gras ducks by many orders of magnitude. 

I asked Fulton of Pro-Animal DC about singling out foie gras over other issues. “Just because some things are also bad doesn’t mean that foie gras production is good,” she told me. (Pro-Animal Future, its umbrella group, is also behind the Denver ballot measure.)

Much of the issue boils down to what’s politically possible. While there’s been some progress, it’s proven difficult and expensive for animal advocates to reform poultry farming in state legislatures. Foie gras, on the other hand, is sort of a low-hanging fruit; there isn’t a large lobby group behind the US industry, and since it’s a luxury product, most consumers won’t miss it. 

And Denver and DC are just the latest in a string of fights over foie gras. Its sale has been banned in California, along with Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh, and New York City, whose ban has been held up in court in recent years. Over the summer, Brazil banned the sale and production of foie gras, too, and around 20 other countries — mostly in Europe — prohibit its production. (Chicago’s 2006 ban was overturned two years later.)

“We have no money to fight the story,” Ginor said. “People want to attack the 1 percent luxury food.”

Bart Hutchins, head chef at Butterworth’s in Washington, DC, told me he doesn’t want his town to ban what he considers a “great culinary tradition.”

“It is a miracle that we discovered this and that we cultivated it and that we can eat it,” he told me. For his part, Hutchins would rather see animal rights activists work to improve farming conditions for animals farmed on a much larger scale, like chickens and pigs, rather than ban one niche ingredient.

But he may soon have to take foie gras off his menu. Pro-Animal Future is especially confident about DC voters’ support for the ban, which would be a blow to the small US foie gras industry. But another incremental step in advancing animal welfare — and the issue in the minds of more voters.

This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.

When I was a kid, my family would occasionally go fishing on small row boats on the lakes of Montgomery County, Maryland. The point wasn’t to catch fish to eat — we always released them — but rather to spend time together in nature. And for a while, I looked back on those times fondly. But as I’ve learned more about fish and their apparent capacity to feel pain, I now wonder: Was I just stabbing a bunch of fish in the mouth and throwing them back in the water, injured and vulnerable?

Ted Kerasote, a nature writer and lifelong hunter and angler, asked himself some version of this question decades ago after fighting to reel in a silver salmon in Alaska — the last he ever released. He still occasionally catches trout for dinner, but said that his decision to stop catch and release fishing that day in Alaska came down to looking at the situation critically: “Seeing this fish struggle for its life, for what end? I wasn’t going to eat it. Catch and release regulations were in place there. And so it was simply for my pleasure to fight this fish.”

Each year, tens of millions of people take to America’s lakes, rivers, streams, and coastal waters to catch billions of fish. Many of these fish only exist because US governmental agencies put them there; each year, over 1 billion fish are bred in hatcheries and stocked in water bodies primarily for anglers. And although firm estimates are hard to come by, it’s clear that the majority of fish caught are not kept for dinner, but tossed back in. Many fishing grounds actually require fish to be released (more on that later). 

While anglers report being primarily motivated to get on the water to commune with nature, spend time with friends and family, and relax, the whole endeavor is anything but pleasant for the fishes themselves. After the steel hook pierces their oral tissue — and sometimes their eyes, gills, or esophagus — they’re often yanked around to the point of exhaustion before being reeled in. Then they’re exposed to air while the hook is removed from their body (and sometimes also for a photo opportunity), before the angler puts them back into the water. There, the fish reenters an often-treacherous ecosystem while fatigued and injured. Sometimes, the hook can’t even be removed and likely remains in their mouths for hours or days.

Estimates on what percent of released fish die vary widely. One 2005 literature review landed the average at 18 percent, while a 2026 review put it at 11 percent. But these are by no means definitive, as they each pooled together data from dozens of studies with different methodologies and time observed after catch and release, which limits our understanding of fishes’ survival from these encounters. 

A different 2026 study, though also imperfect, took a more cleanly experimental approach. Researchers line-caught 489 Chinook salmon and then placed them in holding tanks for observation. Eight percent died within two hours of hooking, and about 25 percent died within 10 days. It’s reasonable to assume that the mortality rate would be higher if the fish were placed back into their local waters, with predators and other natural threats lurking.

Even when fish are caught by scientists like in this case, the operation is by no means surgical. In the Chinook study, 90 percent of the fish experienced moderate to severe fin damage, around 45 percent had moderate to severe hook wounds, and 8 percent suffered severe eye damage.

“No fish is better off because we’ve caught it,” Steven Cooke, a biologist and fisheries scientist at Carleton University in Canada — and an avid angler himself — told me. “It is impossible to catch a fish without causing, one, some level of injury, and two, physiological disturbance.” 

In other words, recreational catch and release fishing injures billions of animals (a vast number of whom were bred for this fate) and condemns many of them to a premature death, and likely a more unpleasant one than if they had simply been killed humanely immediately after catch. Which means that what is often portrayed as a peaceful — even benevolent — pastime is, in another light, a more torturous activity. Especially if you think fish might experience pain. 

What does a fish feel? 

For much of recent history, it’s been thought that fish — far from us on the evolutionary tree, living in ecosystems largely foreign to us — don’t feel pain. But in the early 2000s, a group of scientists in the United Kingdom began to conduct experiments on fish that slowly undermined this belief.

A seminal study, published in 2003, found that fish have nociceptors — sensory neurons that identify and respond to threatening stimuli, like predators or, well, metal hooks jabbed in their mouths. But it wasn’t necessarily evidence that fish feel pain in a similar sense to how we and other animals might; for that, a scientist would need to demonstrate that fish are not just reflexively reacting to noxious stimuli but also that their brains perceive it as pain.

Since then, researchers have poked and prodded fish to see if something more is going on than mere threat avoidance. They have, for example, injected acid and bee venom into the lips of rainbow trout, whose respiration rates nearly doubled and who proceeded to rub their lips against rocks or the tank walls — seemingly in an attempt to soothe the injury. 

In another experiment, scientists trained fish to feed in a certain part of their tank, and then subjected them to electric shocks in that area. The fish were less likely to seek out food as the shock intensity increased. 

But Cooke, the angler and fisheries scientist, isn’t convinced. He wants fellow anglers to treat fish better insofar as he wants fish to reproduce, grow, and have a good life, but says he’s a “fish pain skeptic.” 

“The evidence base around fish pain is meager and generally low quality, extremely biased, and unable to tell us whether or not fish have the capacity to feel pain or not,” Cooke told me. (Cooke, for his part, says he is biased too, and has received funding from pro-fishing interests.) 

The core of the skeptics’ argument boils down to the idea that fishes’ brains don’t possess the necessary equipment to experience pain — namely, the neocortex, which plays a major role in our and other mammals’ processing of pain.

Culum Brown, a professor and fish welfare researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, vehemently disagrees. “All [the information] we have to date suggests the behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses [in fish] mimic humans,” Brown told me. “Whatever way you look at it there are far more similarities than differences, which is not surprising given how important pain perception is from an evolutionary standpoint.” (Brown, I should note, has received some funding from animal welfare and ocean protection foundations.)

We know that various species of fish can use tools, recognize themselves in a mirror, build artistic nests, form complex social relationships, distinguish between human faces, and maintain long-term memories, among other abilities. Is it such a stretch, then, to extend them the capacity for pain?

Ultimately, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written, the fish pain debate is partly a scientific one and partly a philosophical one. “The question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively,” she wrote. One must be conscious to feel pain, and consciousness remains a mystery. With this uncertainty, we can continue to act as if they don’t feel pain, or we could give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, is, like Cooke, not quite convinced fish feel pain. But she argues that we ought to take a precautionary approach and act as if fish can experience pain until proven otherwise. 

With that in mind, should we be fishing for fun at all? 

Reducing harm in sportfishing — and rethinking it altogether

For his part, even as a fish pain skeptic and angler, Cooke is keen to reduce harm to fish. And the most important way to do that, he says, is to keep fish wet. He’s even on the board of a nonprofit called Keep Fish Wet.   

Why? “Most fish do not do well when exposed to air,” Cooke said. Their gills collapse and/or stick together, making it hard for them to get the oxygen they need.

“A fish should always be dripping wet,” and only out of the water for 10 seconds or less (the average time anglers kept fish in the air, in one study, was 29 seconds). The group Cooke works with also suggests anglers minimize handling time. And Cooke said fish will experience more stress if they’re caught in warm waters, as it holds less of the oxygen they need. 

Brown had a lot more to say. Anglers should avoid “playing” with the fish and bring them in as quickly as possible; use barbless hooks, which makes for an easier release; and when deepsea fishing, bring the fish up slowly to prevent barotrauma. And for those who kill, rather than release the fish they catch, do so quickly, rather than letting fish slowly suffocate or bleed out.

As Kerasote, the nature writer and hunter and angler, pointed out, catch and release as a widespread hobby is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in recent decades have state wildlife agencies made it a rule in many water bodies, in an effort to prevent fish depletion so as to ensure there is enough for wildlife to eat — and also so that there are always plenty of fish for anglers to catch. 

Before this, Kerasote said, “you went out there, you caught your limit and you were done.” But with catch and release, “there was no limit anymore, and that’s what became embedded in the fishing culture.”

To account for this shift, Kerasote wants to see states limit access to fishing in the same way that they hold lotteries to hunt certain mammals, like elk and Bighorn sheep.

Some fish scientists question the practice of catch and release altogether. While addressing an audience full of anglers at a conference, zoologist Eugene K. Balon bravely — or perhaps foolishly — shared a provocative thought experiment to prove his point. 

Imagine there is a recreational activity called “sportbirding,” Balon proposed, in which participants take fishing rods, put earthworms on the hooks, and cast them out into the forest. Then they wait until a bird — a Robin, in his example — falls for the bait and bites down on the hook.

“The shrieking and flopping bird is proudly wheeled toward the hide, the hook removed and the bird drowned in the water,” Balon said to the crowd (the water, in this case, is a parallel to fish exposed to air). “Would any one of you support such recreational activity? How does it differ from the sportfishing you support?”

“Sportbirding” would surely be considered barbaric to many — even many anglers, I imagine — and yet sportfishing enjoys widespread social acceptance, perhaps because of the persisting belief among many that fish don’t experience pain. 

Recreational fishing also has far-ranging impacts on species beyond its direct targets. For example, a study of over 2,500 pelicans taken into wildlife rehabilitation centers in Florida near the longest fishing pier in the world found that more than half of the birds had been injured by fishing hooks and lines — the leading cause of injury. Stocking nonnative fish to local water bodies can also upset natural food chains and ecosystems. And some of the live baitfish used by anglers spread disease to wild fish populations. 

There is also the issue of these “bait” animals themselves. Billions and billions of smaller fish — like minnows and shiners — are reared and sold each year in the US only to themselves be stabbed through with a fishing barb and intentionally kept alive and thrashing to entice a larger fish to chomp down on them. This is an additional, yet largely hidden, layer of suffering in the recreational fishing industry.

“I think fishing is worse than hunting,” Brown told me. “At least you know what you are targeting when hunting. And hunters pride themselves on a clean kill. It is a very different ethic,” than fishing, he said. That’s evident particularly in the world of competitive sportfishing, where marathon “fights” to reel in enormous fish are glorified.

For Cooke, many survey respondents, and even for me years ago, fishing is often about spending time with family outdoors, away from technology, while marveling at fish. But couldn’t that all be more or less achieved by taking a hike in the woods, snorkeling, boating, scuba diving, catching fish in nets, or even “hookless” fishing, which is practiced by a tiny contingent of anglers?

Not necessarily. Anglers, he said, are also motivated by the “thrill of the chase.” The uncertainty of what type of fish they will catch, and whether they catch any fish at all, keeps drawing anglers back to the water. Cooke said plenty of people who fish might also be driven by the “human domination of nature.”

Humans, like all creatures, are hardwired for survival. And for the vast majority of our history, that entailed catching and killing fish for sustenance. But now, most fishing is done for fun, or for those other pursuits: relaxation, thrills, the domination of nature. But the fun comes with an enormous moral cost that most anglers, it appears, would rather not confront. Because as our understanding of fish and their capacities evolves, our ideas about fishing might need to evolve, too.