I remember standing on Halfway Bridge over the Kawishiwi River with Ely’s Tobey Maki in about 1981.

It was the opening day of fishing season, and Maki, then in his 80s, was dangling a minnow from the bridge down to the river. He wanted to catch some walleyes and take them back “to the old people.”

The conversation came around to the old topic of whether fish could feel pain. Some anglers, perhaps to rationalize their fishing, claimed that a hooked fish could feel no pain. Tobey wasn’t buying it.

“They say it don’t hurt ’em, but the hell it don’t,” Tobey said.

Now there’s evidence that Tobey was right. Research by a team of biologists at Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute was published recently by the Royal Society, one of Britain’s leading scientific institutes. Biologists who did the study found that rainbow trout have pain receptors and that those fish can undergo “a potentially painful experience.”

I have always been in the same camp as Tobey. I think fish feel pain. It seems pretty obvious to me by the way a hooked fish behaves that it isn’t particularly happy about its situation.

If you’re an angler, reading the findings in the British journal leaves you with about three choices. You could choose not to believe it and keep on fishing. You could believe it and give up fishing. Or you could believe it but keep fishing. I guess I’m in the last camp. I don’t think fish enjoy being caught, but I don’t plan to quit fishing as a result.

A Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby, went further last week and said anyone who practices catch-and-release fishing is cruel. Jacoby has no problem with anyone who catches fish and eats them.

It’s hard for me to take Jacoby’s comments lightly. I have always considered myself an ethical fisherman. I catch and kill fish sometimes. I catch and release fish other times. Sometimes I do both in the same day.

Catch-and-release fishing did not become popular in the past 20 years because anglers wanted to watch fish suffer. It has become necessary because if anglers keep all the fish they catch, they will deplete the resource. There are simply too many of us, and we’re too good at catching fish.

So, either a whole bunch of us have to give up fishing completely, or we have to release some of the fish we catch. I don’t foresee a mass exodus of anglers.

All of that said, I think we should be mindful of what we’re doing with the fish we catch.

We ought to play them quickly, so we can return them to the water with the strength to recover. We should minimize the time we keep a fish out of water, gasping for air. If possible, we should remove the hook without removing the fish from the water. There are times and places to use barbless hooks.

I consider it a privilege to go fishing, catch a few fish and share them with my family or friends. I’m sure Tobey did, too. I’m not denying that I have fun in the process. But if we’re going to keep fishing, we’ll have to keep releasing a portion of what we catch.

I don’t know if Jacoby has ever held a 5-pound walleye in his hand for a few seconds, lowered it to the water, watched it flick its tail and disappear in the depths. I have, and I find it hard to believe that’s a bad thing.