Today it's rays Tomorrow it's ????

[re-tyred]

Something that may interest ray fishers.
https://www.change.org/p/minister-for-a ... er-of-rays

[Nude up]

I don't know which port phillip bay they are in but the one I fish has a huge number of rays and banjos in and I havent seen to many dead and mutilated fish around

[re-tyred]

My son catches a few to eat. The one in the pic has been processed to eat. No sensible person would cut the wings off without killing it first. It would be far too dangerous to do anything to a stingray without stunning it with a mallet first. The people signing this would happily go to the supermarket and buy some Basser fillets from the fish farm in Vietnam. As for letting kids swim with them and play in the shallows with them... it makes me shudder. I have seen grown men, tough footballers, reduces to a screaming mess when they have been stabbed in the leg by a stingray. Let alone poor old Steve Erwin...

[4liters]

No sensible person would cut the wings off without killing it first.

Sensible people aren't especially common unfortunately. I've seen a couple of dead rays on the bottom inside the breakwall at Portarlington when I was last there a year or so ago, and I've heard people killing banjos is fairly common. Same with toadies.

The petition is pointless because killing fish you aren't intending to keep or use as bait is already banned, it's just not enforced or people don't know/care.

[frozenpod]

Zero evidence to support their claims......

[frozenpod]

Link to their facebook group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/284931308587771/

[laneends]

Its just a perception thing. Its a big fish and there is a lot of waste carcass, and scavangers take a while to process it. So it just looks bad. Add to which for the same reason no one one wants to take the whole thing home and dispose of it there. I guess if someone regularly targets them at the same spot a whole pile of these would look decidedly off.

Bigger issue is the land based anglers that drag them in and because of the danger in handling them dont drag them back in to the water but just leave them stranded to die. Seen quite a few in WP left like this.

[Fish-cador]

That was in the news recently. The ray was found around Rye. The idiot who cut that thing up alive is a total loser.

Some of the petitioners probably have vested interest. Citing "tourism" suggests dive operations involved.

Too costly to monitor. They should pay for the monitoring and extra policing.

[Delirium]

The idiot who cut that thing up alive is a total loser.

While I personally have no interest in killing a big old ray for a meal, do we actually know that the ray was alive when its wings were removed? Again...I think they are beautiful creatures and best left alone, but it's an assumption that it was alive when the wings were taken. Don't get me wrong....It wouldn't surprise me at all that there are morons capable of such stupidity, but who knows what the case was here. No law was broken (other than maybe returning the carcass to the water at that location?....from memory that may be a technicality?).

Entire, dead rays including banjos are a completely different matter....irrefutable stupidity...laziness....and a lack of respect!!!!! Even the tens of toadies I see left at LB fishing locations around the boat ramps I use is no less disrespectful.

The sad thing is that the 'lobbyists' will eventually have a win out of stuff like this...and the rest of us respectful fishos will pay the price.

Rant over!

[frozenpod]

The idiot who cut that thing up alive is a total loser.

While I personally have no interest in killing a big old ray for a meal, do we actually know that the ray was alive when its wings were removed?

Agreed zero proof has been provided of this.

100% the people behind the petition are diver groups.