Squirrel fishing is the sporting practice of "catching" squirrels and attempting to lift them into the air using a peanut tied to a string or fishing line, and optionally some kind of fishing pole.
In most cases, squirrels playfully tug and grapple with the nuts, while the human participant skillfully angles with his or her quarry. A delicate approach is required in squirrel fishing. Anyone can pull a nut from the hands of a squirrel, but the adept "squirrel fisher" must tune his craft, maintaining balance between himself and the squirrel, and eventually rewarding the squirrel for his valiant competition by ceding the nut. Ideally, great care is taken not to overfeed squirrels, not to hit them with nuts, and not to treat them roughly. There has been some debate over where squirrel fishing originated. The practice was popularized either by Nikolas Gloy and Yasuhiro Endo, at the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, or by the Berkeley Squirrel Fisher's Club (BSF), an official student group at the University of California at Berkeley. BSF has been featured in several local periodicals.
While nuts were originally used as bait, some squirrel fishers now choose to use prunes or apple slices as bait, by running fishing line or string through the fruit. This creates a tougher challenge for the squirrel, as it must chew its way through the fruit to free it from the line.I work with someone who keeps suggesting that we do this; I wasn't aware that there was an offical term for tormenting squirrels.
