Catfish have to be the toughest creatures..

LBrown59 · Mar 19, 2006

You just made me laugh my arse off. I never heard of anyone blowing away a fish with a .22 Magnum.
 Here's one that tops that. 
Back when I was in high school my buddies Mom wanted him to kill a chicken for supper so he shot it with a 410 pumpkin ball.

JimR · Mar 19, 2006

Up in Northern Vermont they hunt Northern Pike with high powered rifles. You don't even need to hit them either. Just blast away near them. The shock knocks them out and they float to the top for you to pick up. Peta and the Anti's tried to stop this kind of hunting a few years ago and failed. Too bad they weren't in the water while it was going on.

Jstpssng · Mar 19, 2006

( Up in Northern Vermont they hunt Northern Pike with high powered rifles ...)
Were they introduced by "bucket biologists", as the muskies were here in Maine? /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif

JimR · Mar 19, 2006

I beleive the Northern Pike have been in Lake Champlain for many many years. I don't think the bucket bio's did it.

Jstpssng · Mar 19, 2006

( I beleive the Northern Pike have been in Lake Champlain for many many years. I don't think the bucket bio's did it. )

OOPS, guess I'd better bone up on my geography again.

(The universe still revolves around Maine, doesn't it?) /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

SPIKER · Mar 20, 2006

ya I watched one of the shows on tv where over in japan/china or some other aisian place they have fish tank in the resteraunt, take catch the fish you pick out, scale it alive, slice it's sides & back dip & roll in a flour mixture and fry it in a wock, keeping the head wrapped in a moist towl and served cooked on table still alive & gasping :x with the customers picking at it with chop sticks... /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif /forums/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif
now that is kind of crewl & in-humane to me, wacking one to put it down is ok but not eating it alive. :blach

mark M

fishman · Mar 20, 2006

That's great! That's the first I've ever heard of someone shooting a catfish . . . very funny and I bet very effective.

Here is what I do when a catfish is still alive.

Get a round stick about 1.5 to 2" in diameter. You can use a hammer, but it is more likely to glance off the fish's head and hurt you more than him. Take the stick and hit him at a right angle to his body right behind the eyes, but not so far that you get up on the meat behind the skull. Hit him hard and his skull will fracture and stun him. He'll go rigid and it's all over. You might practice with a dead one first. The biggest mistake you can do is be timid when you hit him. It won't be effective and actually will cause more distress/pain if fish feel that sort of thing.

The easy way is just to put the fish in a cooler of ice and wait a couple of hours. They will simply go to sleep and die, and they will be nice and rigid for fileting, not to mention the fact that the meat will be firmer also making for easier cutting. This is the method I use when I have the time. In fact, catfish placed in ice for 24-48 hours prior to fileting are by far the easiest to clean.

Bird · Mar 20, 2006

John, I've filleted them a lot of ways over the years, but your method is also my favorite. When I was a kid though, we caught a lot of catfish that were small enough to fry whole and my parents left the skin on. Dad would take a pair of pliers, insert the lower jaw into the fish's mouth with the upper jaw on top of the fish's head, then stick the point of a knife right into the brain to kill the fish. He would then dip it into hot water and Mother would usually help by grasping the fish right behind the head with a towel and pull down to the tail, firmly wiping the entire fish except for the head. Dad would then cut the head off and gut the fish and it was ready to roll in the cornmeal and fry. And I haven't seen that done since I was in my early teens. However, I have held them with pliers that way and killed them with a knife, then cut through the skin around the head and used the skinning pliers to pull the skin off. But just filleting them as you do is still my preferred method.

Jimbrown · Mar 20, 2006

We always used a similar system for catfish/gaftop. we gutted them but left the rest of the fish and then froze them. When we were ready to cook them we let them thaw for a few minutes untill the skin was thawed but not the fish and then skined them. If you do this you lose almost no edible meat. It also works for scaled fish.

EddieWalker · Mar 20, 2006

My brother and I were up in Mt. Pleasant today looking at some properties. The rains ended this morning sometime, and it was early afternoon. We were looking at a pond on this piece of land when I noticed a catfish lying in the grass downstream. I touched it with my toe and it moved. My brother picked it up and we headed toward the pond. Half way there we came across another one twice as big. Maybe half a pound. He touched it with his toe and it didn't move. It was all dried up and we figured it was dead. I gave it a light kick and saw it's gills move, so I picked it up to. When we put them into the pond, they both dived down, swam back up and then dived again for good. If I was guessing, I'd say they were both out of the pond for about 3 to 4 hours.

Eddie