OHIO – Walking through the aisles of the Sports section of the local mega mart, eight-year-old "Ducky" Gray observed the various tackle options for an upcoming fishing trip he was going to make with his father. Of all the tackle (fishing line, hooks, sinkers, bobbers, bait, nets, and more), Ducky homed in on the lures.
“Are those real?” he asked his dad.
“No, those are fake lures that the fish go after,” Ducky thought for a moment.
“So, we are scamming the fish?”
“What?” His father was caught off guard by the comment.
“The fish think that they are real worms, right? But they are not; they are fake. So not only are we trying to catch the fish, but we also aren’t even giving them real food as bait. That sounds like a scam.” The eight-year-old pondered further on the topic. “I don’t think I want to use these to catch fish.”
“Ducky, they are fish. There isn’t a moral issue with using lures to catch them; it is like we are using real bait. It is only used to attract the fish to the hook so that we can bring them in. Think of the fried fish we could have!”
“Nope, sounds like a scam,” the child concluded. “I don’t like the idea of scamming fish.”
“It isn’t a scam.”
“The lure is an imposter. We buy and use the lure, so we are imposter scamming the fish.” Ducky’s father moved out of the lure section, slightly exasperated by the conversation with his son.
“Worms, we will use worms!”
“You know, even if we use real worms, the idea that we would hook a fish on the false pretense of food seems fraudulent in nature. The fish doesn’t realize that there is a hook involved. They just see the food. We would have to disclose the hook to them. That seems problematic to do based on the intelligence of a fish and the inability to communicate with it. Can we just go to a park?”