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RAY
SCOTT OUTDOORS
Presents
Short Casts & Backlashes
By Bob Cobb
How-To Fool the Fishin’ Public
It’s
the biggest joke of the year, but folks still fall hook, line and sinker every April 1st
to clever pranksters.
But, lately the April Fools’ Day practical jokes seem to
be played on the all-too gullible fishing public.
And, not just fishermen. But
the outdoor press. Newspaper reports appeared
in the Tyler Morning Telegraph, the Palestine Herald-Press and the Dallas Morning News as
a result of the PETA organization threatening to “sabotage” a bass fishing
tournament, April 1, on Lake Palestine.
The PETA folks (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
have been in the anti-hunting mode for years and circulated anti-fishing reading material
to young children claiming “fish have feelings, too.”
So, when a faxed news release declared the PETA people planned
on dumping sedatives into Lake Palestine to spoil the tournament, the press and even the
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department jumped to attention.
“This year, the fish will be napping, not nibbling,”
stated the press notice, and declared that “impaling” bass on hooks is painful
and hardly sporting.
The Wildlife Department and the Upper Neches River Municipal
Water Authority found it a serious concern. They,
even, called out the park rangers to be alert to “drug-dumping activists.”
Seriously? Lake
Palestine covers some 25,000 surface acres. Never
mind that it would take a trainload of tranquilizers to put the bass into the supposed
lethargic state. The Texas officials
swallowed the bait.
To the prankster’s tongue-in-cheek credit, several clues were
evident in the release. The PETA official
credited with the statement was “Jo Kizonu,” meaning the “joke is on
you.” Also, “April Phule” was
referred to as a PETA spokesperson, and provided an obvious clue.
With all the evidence that fishermen are, perhaps, the most
likely to stretch the truth, they oddly enough fall for most piscatorial pranks.
Sporting Classics, a very upscale outdoor publication
based in Columbia, South Carolina, went overboard. They
published a report with four-color photos of the “new world record bass.” The fish caught in the Carolina lowlands
reportedly broke the all-time 22-pounds, 4-ounces world record credited to George Perry in
June 1932 from Georgia’s Lake Montgomery.
The story, a hum-dinger of a setup, appeared in Sporting
Classics bi-monthly publication and sent the outdoor press scrambling, trying to get
interviews with the so-named angler. Everything,
including the slick camera work to mask the largemouth’s true size, came off as a
well-done hoax.
“We fooled a lot of people,” admits Chuck Wechsler,
the magazine’s editor, “but a lot of them didn’t think it was so funny. There’s been so many stories about
‘world record bass being caught and eaten’…maybe they just wanted to
believe it was true.”
Not so. But, you
can bet by April 1, 2001 someone will come up with one…another April Fools’ Day
sting. |
