Nature & Animals Quote by Norman MacCaig

The line works because it refuses the comfort of clean moral categories. MacCaig starts with a chatty confession - “Well, I love fishing” - then immediately folds in a contradiction sharp enough to snag: he won’t kill a fly, yet he’ll “thump” a fish without hesitation. That skewed hierarchy of life is both ordinary and quietly grotesque, and he knows it. “A lot of men are like that” isn’t solidarity so much as indictment: a shrug masquerading as common sense, the moral anesthesia of tradition.

MacCaig’s genius is the voice. It’s conversational, almost pub-like, full of clipped rhythms and practical verbs (“Out you come. Thump.”). Those blunt beats mimic the physical act and, more importantly, the mental shortcut that makes it feel acceptable. The fish becomes an object moved through stages: extracted, struck, silenced. The syntax does what the speaker does - reduces.

Then comes the destabilizer: “And that’s not the only reason.” Suddenly the speech isn’t just about sport or appetite; it’s about motive. Pleasure, power, boredom, masculinity, control over a living thing that can’t argue back - all hover in the unsaid. In the context of MacCaig’s wider work (often attentive to Highlands landscape, animals, and human intrusion), the quote reads like a self-audit performed in real time. The poem’s ethical drama isn’t whether fishing is “right” or “wrong.” It’s how easily a decent person can learn to compartmentalize cruelty, then call it normal.