FROM THE ARCHIVES:In his "Off the Reel" angling column George Burrows considered some weighty topics at the Clarenbridge Oyster Festival in Co Galway in 1964.
SOME PEOPLE can be most inconsiderate. There I was at Clarenbridge, last Saturday, on the point of declaring terrible and bloodless war on a plate of oysters and a pail of Guinness, when a deep voice over my shoulder said: “ ‘Off the Reel’ did not catch them on rod and line, and anyway you should not be cruel to the inoffensive oyster.”
And even before I had time to look around, taking care not to spill the trayful of oysters and stout, the voice asked: “Tell me, do you fish for oysters?”
Coincidences certainly are strange things. They happen – even at oyster festivals. I had been reading that very morning all about cruelty to animals and birds, vertebrates and invertebrates, all in a book written by E.S. Turner: All Heaven in a Rage. In it he recalls that while the poet Cowper would not even talk to a man who put his foot on a worm. Cowper, fond of his food and no vegetarian, sent his thanks to various good ladies who sent him presents of game and fish and oysters. The oyster, says Turner, was “a living brute”, among those which Cowper defended, except that Cowper did not see fit to spare it.
[ . . . ]The voice at Clarenbridge went on nagging, even after I had dealt with the plateful and was on my way for a second one. He even mentioned the name Martin to me and asked me if I had ever heard of him – “Humanity” Martin, the man whose front gate at Oughterard, in the good old days, started a track called an avenue that ended at Ballynahinch, across Connemara, where Martin lived.
When Martin was campaigning for the proper care of animals and birds, everything that moves, his opponents jeered him. Again, Turner recalls a House of Commons debate in which the Attorney-General opposed Martin’s ideas and one MP professed to see laws that would not only forbid a stubborn horse being beaten, but would prevent the boiling of lobsters and the eating of live oysters. That was in 1822.
In the years after that Martin nibbled away like a mouse at the evils of mistreating animals and birds and had to stand up to much abuse – I suppose it really was a form of teasing – because he was not then rushing to the defence of rats and oysters. Indeed the teasers wanted Martin to petition the French king to abolish the torture of frogs and to stop the eating of Strasbourg pie made from the livers of geese!
Mark you, all this and more at Clarenbridge! I consoled myself that Martin was a long time dead and that he left behind him a power of great work in defence of animals.
But as a fat, juicy oyster disappeared with Guinness, I thanked all the luck stars I have known in the angling world that the oyster remains on the seasonally unprotected list and is eagerly sought by people who would climb a mountain to save a sheep with a broken hind leg.
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