Maine’s dog fish maligned as sea cannibals during early 1900s

The government protects dogfish from overfishing today, while scientists study the little sharks looking for ways to treat cancer and other diseases.

A century ago, however, dogfish received little respect. Called demons of the sea, saltwater hogs, sea cannibals and other derogatory names, they were targeted by fishermen for extermination.

“Dogfish Menace Maine Fisheries,” read a headline on July 8, 1904, in the Bangor Daily News. “The dogfish plague is now beginning to assume serious proportions and if the fish continues to increase as the season advances as fast as they are now, indications are that the fishing industry off the Maine coast will be seriously injured if not practically ruined, for a time, at least,” wrote the reporter, carefully qualifying his words and attributing at least part of his story to an article in the Portland Express. “Reports brought in today are that there are plenty of mackerel outside, but the dogfish keep them so frightened that they cannot be caught.”

Bluefish had posed a similar problem a few years ago until people discovered how good they tasted. By 1904, “they are caught up so close that they do not have much of a chance to get together and make attacks on the other fish.” Unfortunately, nobody liked to eat the dogfish “on account of its stringy composition,” and society hadn’t found much else to do with it.

Earlier in the spring, other stories out of Eastport and Cutler said local fishermen were organizing to send delegates to Congress to testify in favor of a bill that would establish a bounty on dogfish. The fishermen in those towns were concerned about the loss of herring, lobsters and “all deep sea fish all along our coast.”

The newspaper horror stories continued. The Calais Advertiser reported Capt. Walter Tolman of the smack Lelia Tolman had pulled one of his trawls to find clinging to the hooks the heads of 127 haddock. “The bodies had been eaten by the dogfish and the results of Capt. Tolman’s labors were gone almost in an instant,” the paper said.

Stories in both the NEWS and The New York Times in August told of plans in Canada to rid the coast of dogfish by establishing “reduction plants to convert the fish into fertilizer and glue” in northern New Brunswick, southern Cape Breton and on the Magdalene Islands. Bounties had been ruled out as impractical, said the reports.

At the end of July, a truly memorable piece in the New York Times took the growing hysteria one step further. Some or all of this fish story was attributed to a report in the Bangor Daily Commercial.

After describing the threat dogfish posed to the fishery, the story recounted some truly amazing anecdotes that had earned the headline “Dogfish as Man Eaters: Sea Cannibals a Real Peril Along the Coast of Maine.”

The reporter wrote, “Another man speaking of the danger to human life from dogfish related an occurrence off Moose Island, near Boothbay Harbor, thirty-odd years ago, when he was a youth. Two young Bostonians spending the summer there were out sailing one day when they dropped anchor and one of them sprang into the ocean for a swim. He was immediately surrounded by a school of dogfish and in his death agony begged piteously to his companion in the boat to shoot him and end his torture … The body was never recovered and was probably quickly eaten by these cannibals of the sea.

“At Monhegan twenty years ago,” the story continued, “a small boy fell from a boat in which his father sat and before he could be rescued he was killed by dogfish. Instances are related in which they attack the oars of a boat … and bite slices out of them. During the dogfish season it is dangerous for persons when rowing to put their hands in the water as is the custom on many hot days.”

One can picture stories like these being told to young, gullible reporters in suits by old salts with the straightest of faces and the thickest of Down East accents.

Having been stuck by the spine on a dogfish’s belly as I held it up in the air on my fishing line many years ago, I’ve learned the greatest respect for dogfish. The result was a partially paralyzed leg for part of an afternoon and a trip to the doctor’s office for a shot.

My father and I would go out two or three miles, letting our boat drift in a patch of lobster buoys over some ledge. Often back then, we returned with half a dozen big cod. If we caught dogfish, however, we knew it was time to move but not before my father managed to murder a few of the beasts with his filleting knife.

Having read these old newspaper stories, I understand better why he acted that way. He had worked as a boy on commercial fishing boats captained by his older brothers, who were young men in 1904. They hated the dogfish just as surely as if the creatures had been their mortal enemy.

Times have changed a bit but not completely, according to Sonja Fordham of the environmental group Ocean Conservancy. Dogfish are eaten extensively in some European countries such as Britain, where they are used in fish and chips. The U. S. government moved to protect them a few years ago on the East Coast when it was determined the number of mature females had dropped by 75 percent. In the last seven years, however, record low numbers of “pups” have been born.

“That’s really a calamity,” said Fordham.

And the attitudes of some fishermen haven’t changed that much from a century ago. They still consider efforts to protect dogfish a joke.

“I think generally they still don’t get the respect they deserve,” Fordham said.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.