Just not Hungry

Just not hungry Fish feeding habits are not very well understood, but Colin Davidson, our resident ace Carp Crew angling analyst, sheds some light on the topic.

- Colin Davidson

I’M convinced that one of the biggest underlying causes of inconsistent sport on busy fisheries is simply due to carp not being particularly hungry.

Why aren’t they hungry? Carp are these amazing, much talked about eating machines, aren’t they? Well, you wouldn’t be hungry either if you had as much bait thrown at you each day as the carp on many popular venues.

It’s a great unknown factor, and impossible to assess the impact that lots of feed has on fish and fishing. But I’ve seen enough instances over the years to know absolutely without question that high levels of food going into fisheries is a double-edged sword.

The more food available to a carp, the more that it tends to grow, and the bigger it gets, the more valuable it becomes and the more prized it is when anglers catch it. But the better fed a carp is, the much less likely it is to get caught, because it’s simply not under any pressure in terms of day-to-day feeding.

Anyone who’s ever gone all- inclusive on their summer holiday will tell you that it doesn’t take many days of nice food being available in unlimited quantities to feel a bit less inclined to have a second helping. Dogs are the same – try to interest an overfed dog in a treat and there’s nowhere near the same response as in an animal that has a more regulated food intake. When I inherited my wife’s bad tempered Jack Russell it was on the porky side, and it would simply turn its nose up at plain biscuits – it just wasn’t hungry enough to be excited by them. If you gave it a bone or chew, it would go and try and bury it somewhere for later because there was no real inclination to eat it there and then. It’s a mental picture that I haven’t forgotten, and I think an overfed dog is a very keen analogy to many carp.