For those that don’t know, carp are a hideous trash fish, covered with a layer of disgusting brown scales slathered in slime with a mouth that appears designed to give cold, slippery blowjobs to the demons of hell. They tend to swarm near docks and shallow areas where people throw them bread, writhing at the surface gasping for their handout like so many putrescent brown whores.
According to the NY Times, the English “so love the fish that they … customarily kiss each before releasing it back into the water.”
Now, as a middle-class American I’ve been indoctrinated to view the UK as a sort of superior mother country whose inhabitants instantly gain a higher level of social cachet then an American of similar background. This article threatens to destroy this view.
So, UK Dopers: Is the article telling the truth? If you fish, do you kiss carp? If you don’t, do you know people who do? Have you ever heard of this practice before? :dubious:
Rex Hunt, who is Australian and has his own fishing show (or had, I dunno, don’t really keep up with that kind of things) kissed fish before throwing them back in. It was his schtick. It was pretty silly.
That sounds outrageous. Not as outrageous as kissing a carp, but then the NY Times says Englishmen kiss carp, and when have they ever lied (note that the article wasn’t written by Jason Blair)?
However, the NYT was “had”. Some freinds (well- dudes I sorta knew) of mine, years ago, in the Sierra Club, took a Journalist on a day hike. At the top, at lunch time, they pulled a whole watermelon out of the strongest hikers pack, sliced it up, and served it, claiming with a straight face that it was 'traditional". The Journalist dutifully printed it.
The claim for kissing carp is not as absurd as it may seem. Carp are held in much higher esteem as a sport fish in the UK. There’s a whole culture of carp fishing, with special rods, bobbers, and baits specifically for carp. There are carp fishing clubs, carp fishing magazines, and, believe it or not, private lakes where people pay specifically for the privillege of fishing for carp. Most of this carp fishing is catch and release - big carp are considered too valuable to waste, and fisherman look forward to outwitting the same big fish time and time again.
I haven’t heard as much about the way carp is valued on the continent but it’s reasonable to believe that they like the old bottom feeders more than we do.
That carp are highly regarded among the Japanese is fairly obvious. They’ve named major sports teams after carp. Can you even imagine doing that in the states?
For us, it’s usually regarded as a trash fish, and many states encourage fisherman to kill all the carp they catch because they are a foreign species that damages the habitat for native fish. Some states have regular carp poisonings at certain lakes to keep the carp population from exploding.
I am not an angler. However, I live by a canal, and see anglers every day. And I’ve never yet seen one snog a fish.
(I’m getting flashbacks to a little ditty called Have You Ever Tried Kissing A Mermaid, too, but it will contribute nothing factual towards the discussion … )
One of them is from the UK, the other from the USA. I doubt if it’s a particularly common practice anywhere, but it appears to be the same sort of thing as when a sportsperson kisses a trophy, rather than an expression of admiration for the fish itself, as the newspaper article implies.
This is the internet. Not only is there someone else out there who finds it arousing, there’s probably a subculture built around the topic. It’s highly probable there’s a “British Man/Carp Love Assocation” out there somewhere.
