Quote:
Originally Posted by Wingman
I agree with you about tigers in a nutritional sense. They do contain some fatty acids and minerals which are an essential part of a carps diet but otherwise are fairly useless nutritionally (which is why I believe they generally blow quite quickly)
As for your argument that they can cause health damage due to a lack of nutritious absorption, again I agree, only in situations however where tigers make up the greater percentage of a carps diet. I would also like to point out that just about any popular carp bait you can think of : sweetcorn, pellet and of course boilie would present similar problems to a carp if it became the fishes primary foodsource over an extended period of time. Even the best HNV baits do not provide all the nutritional requirements necessary for healthy fish.
As for vent damage I would suggest that this is highly unlikely if using properly prepared tigers. I would go further and also suggest that if I am wrong and tigers do cause vent damage then surely this could just as easily occur with a handful of tigers as it could with 50 handfuls. I would also like to point out that carp in certain waters gorge themselves on snails and sometimes crays. Their vents don’t seem to suffer from a large proportion of sharp shell fragments passing through. Even the odd rock sometimes slides through.
Tigers have a bad reputation from a time when they were totally abused as a bait leading to some necessary and many unnecessary bans.
I don't use tigers often and when I do its generally with bags as I've been fishing for a take. I have used them in larger amounts though and caught a few in one sitting. None of the fish caught in those circumstances suffered any ill effects from being caught in that manner.
If I became aware that any method I was adopting to catch fish was having detrimental effects on my quarry I would cease using said method immediately as my priorities are most definitely in order Ollie 
Have a glass on me fella |
Fair response fella, have often wondered seeing that you've brought up crays and snails about something Hutchinson mentioned in one of his books (?) about witnessing carp eating large swan mussels and actually excreting the entireshell intact, minus the inner parts. He mentions that they were passing shells through so large it was causing bleeding, alls I can think of is they must really like mussels to put up with the proverbial ring sting, probably like fellas obsessed with vindaloo...
In respect of this though I would prefer not to present baits that would cause similar circumstances, even properly prepped tigers are still hard and although nine or ten passed out may cause some possible damage, several kilos going through the exhaust would more than likely end up with more detriment.
I just see large amounts as bad due to the aforementioned points but also that as the carp gorge on them they will move about the water shhhitting them out in a similar state as they went in, which results in them more than likely being picked up by other fish, thus the sequence repeats itself. In todays world its like you say probably not going to cause a mass weight loss as witnessed when tigers were fished heavily by a majority to cause serious weight loss/nutritional deficiency, but on some waters where nobody baits heavily with a 'food' source it could just have a poor effect on fish health if enough nuts went in.
Thankfully for the fish's sake tigers don't seem to be as 'fashionable' to use as they once were. Its down to the individual to determine the amount they use which hopefully reflects on their general awareness of the baits qualities and non qualities.
