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Martin's point about the digestive system of fish being an acid bath is in fact only true of carnivorous fish species as they have a stomach (foregut), the wall of which secretes hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes which serve to soften and initiate breakdown of food into smaller, absorbable pieces.

Herbivorous or plant-orientated omnivores, i.e. cyprinids, have no stomach but rely on a much extended midgut area.
The wall of the midgut secretes digestive enzymes but not hydrochloric acid, therefore no acid bath.

My guess however is that fish can cope perfectly well with uncooked seeds, one only has to think of the thousands of tons of seeds that find there way into our waterways by natural means during the course of a year to realise that fish in certain areas see seeds as a natural part of their diet.

If anyone is truly worried about things swelling up in a fishes gut can I suggest they do some experiments with pellets.
Take a wine glass or any other smallish vessel, fill it to half way with pellets and add water, (you may have to top it up after a while), after a few hours your pellets will absorb all the water and your vessel will be virtually full of pellet mush, i.e. your pellets will double in volume, which is why it is prudent to feed sparingly when fishing with them.

As for birds eating seeds.
Any countryman or woman will tell you birds have a gizzard; this is the avian equivalent of teeth.
It is used primarily to grind and break-up foods, (such as seeds), and may, in seed-eating birds, contain grit or small stones ingested by the birds to help grind the food.
So they don’t have a problem either.

Derek,

Before you post one of your one line answers I would respectfully ask you to read this very carefully.

Quote:

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hi,if there is any doubt weather it is safe or not for fish to eat seeds,the best thing to do is cook it.derek.

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Once again old friend you seem to have missed the point!

Over the course of a year millions if not billions of seeds find there way into our rivers and lakes, some are blown in i.e. dandelion seeds, grass seeds and the like, others are fired in by the plants themselves, Himalayan balsam being one that springs to mind, some others are deposited by birds and other animals via there droppings, yet more seeds find their way into the rivers every time they flood and in September I was lucky enough to observe a small shoal of large chub gorging themselves on the fruit of a recently fallen elderberry tree.

The point is none of these seeds have been cooked and many if not all of them will go on to be eaten by fish, in fact there is research to suggest that some water plant seeds will not germinate before they have passed through the gut of a fish.

So you see Derek, when we come along and bung our gallon of cooked hemp in we are introducing something that is rarely if ever found in nature, i.e. a boiled seed.

If on the other hand we simply soak our hemp for 24 hours before introducing it then we are introducing something that is perfectly natural.

Now I know what you are thinking……….. “Hemp doesn’t grow in Britain”.

Wrong again……………This country had a long history of hemp growing and it is still grown today albeit in a very controlled manner as can be seen from the links below.

hemp is coming home

hemp farming in the uk

mother hemp.com


Now, having said all that let me give you something else to think about;

How safe as a barbel bait is one of your favourites, the sausage?

This and any of the other processed meat baits that we are all so fond of using are full of chemicals and processed fats,
A quick internet search of, "additives in sausages", will throw up about 436,000 results and some of them are frankly horrifying.
But the worst thing from a fish welfare point is that none of the processed products that we throw in the river willy-nilly occur naturally and therefore the fish have not evolved to cope with them, (nor have we incidentally), so who can say what the long term effects are going to be.

If you really have fish welfare at the forefront of your thoughts then I would suggest that the best thing you can do for them is ditch your processed baits and start using natural baits collected from the river bank on the day you are going to use them.

And stop cooking your hemp.