Why Do Kiwis Measure Trout in Pounds?

New Zealand might just be one of the best places on earth to sight fish for huge wild trout. It’s more like hunting than fishing there.

The fish you see here is legitimately my largest, wild, river-caught trout on a fly rod. It was ten pounds almost exactly and was caught on the south island of New Zealand.

In NZ they typically measure trout by weight and not by length, like many of us here do. Here’s the funny thing…New Zealand uses the Metric system, but every Kiwi we ran into used pounds to measure their fish. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why the rest of the country went with metric measurements while anglers used the imperial system. Then I thought about it a little harder. This fish would have been about 4.5 kilograms. I simply think they use pounds because it just sounds bigger.

Anglers are a funny bunch and deal with fish sizes in many different ways. Anyone run into this phenomenon or anything like it anywhere else?