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No one deserves that shit.

But within a few days, it was normality. Get into work at 8:45, put the kettle on, search for dying fish while chatting to your colleagues, smash the fish against the wall and throw the corpses in the Dead Fish Bag, throw the Dead Fish Bag in the bin, make a cup of tea, then open the shop for customers.

For larger fish, such as carp, we need to resort to different means. For a start, the force required to kill a big carp would probably break the net you use to kill it, and nets are expensive. For most fish over about 10-15 centimeters, the preferred method is to put them in a sturdy plastic bag and then hit them on the head with a half-brick. Hit them too lightly, and they won't be quite dead -- not good. Hit too hard, and the bags break, and you literally end up with blood on your hands.

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If you don't think a fish can hold that much blood, I envy you.

With armored fish, like sterlets, that's still not enough force, so we stomp on them. It feels similar to stepping on a snail. There's the crunch, followed by the gooey center. And no matter how many times you do it, you always make the mistake of looking in the bag afterwards. You can barely see the pulped remains of the fish for all the blood.

Sometimes, you have to kill lots at once, chemically, leaving you with 100 fish in a 20-pound bag. The odd thing is that it doesn't feel as bad as killing a single fish -- at least, not to me personally. Likewise, the guy I do these culls with is too squeamish to kill individuals, but he's fine with mass kills. When it's not a violent and bloody method of euthanasia, it feels all right; like we're not actually killing them. It's like that old saying goes -- "Kill one fish and you're a murderer. Kill a million and you're a conqueror." Well, that or a cook at Long John Silver's. But you can tell people you're a conqueror if you want.