Roger Yazbeck; Freediving, diving to be free
By Hania Jurdak

Cedar Wings
February / March 2000
Page 7 of 8

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(Click here to go back) moment when it gives itself to me. It knows. Native American Indians pray for the beast after they kill it. In turn, we have to be food for others, when in the water, to accept not being on top of the food chain”. He believes in a hunt well-earned. He never shoots fish while scuba diving. He hates seeing fish suffer and focuses on making his aims immediate kill shots. “Yet pain,” he concedes, “is part of life. If you can’t accept it, you can’t live. Instead, you have to hold that surf and navigate well with it. We cannot be radicals. Otherwise, why do we kill cockroaches? Don’t they feel pain?”
So what does Yazbeck propose? He is a promoter of responsible hunting, which he defines as licensed hunting restricted by ecological and civic rules specifying the location, season, and type of species involved. A hunter should be informed: “For example, what is local, as distinguished from what is migratory, has to be preserved, yet if it becomes overpopulated, it will decimate. If I were a Minister of Agriculture in Lebanon, I would sit down with specialists and conduct an analysis of the entire landscape. I would set rigid hunting and fishing rules for a 3-year-term to let nature breathe then designate a hunting and fishing season per specie with size and bag limits supervised by a game officer”.  But most important: I’d increase the coast guard boat presence and give them absolute power to crack down on all poachers, especially the commercial ones. The worst of them all are dynamite, cyanide and compressed air marine life annihilators. I’d also ban bottom gill netting and our nationally infamous net-dragging fishing method, known as the «jaroofeh»
Yazbeck proposes education through raising awareness and the enforcement of rules governing water and underwater sports so that neither swimmers nor 
spearfishermen (Click here to continue)