The crime of not being cute enough

“Fish constitute the greatest source of confused thinking and inconsistency on earth at the moment with respect to pain. You will get people very excited about dolphins because they are mammals, and about horses and dogs, if they are not treated properly. At the same time you will have fishing competitions on the River Murray at which thousands of people snare fish with hooks and allow them to asphyxiate on the banks, which is a fairly uncomfortable and miserable death.”

—Professor Bill Runciman, 
Professor of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care
Adelaide University

“The scientific literature is quite clear. Anatomically, physiologically and biologically, the pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals.”

—Dr. Donald Broom, a scientific advisor to the British government.

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"Do fish know they are in pain? 

In an attempt to show that fish do feel mental discomfort when it comes to pain, an experiment was devised:

• Zebrafish were placed in a maze that opened in to a choice of two chambers – one the equivalent of a cheap motel room, the other the fish equivalent of the Ritz
• On all occasions the fish chose the better chamber
• In a second run, some fish were exposed to mild pain
• The choice was the same as before, however the low-quality chamber was now enriched with pain killers
• Fish in pain were much more likely to now choose the low-quality chamber over the high-quality chamber

This showed that fish were willing to endure unfavourable conditions in order to ease the sensation of pain with painkillers. It was concluded that fish must therefore feel the mental discomfort associated with pain."

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To me, it's always been ridiculous and pretty revolting how so many people seem to lack the basic understanding that fish feel. Of course they do. It wouldn't make much sense if they didn't. Like us, they are vertebrates. Highly developed animals. Ugly and small, but still vertebrates.

A growing number of people are starting to take the welfare of fish seriously. Unfortunately, the old myths are still very much alive, as you can see here. A LiveScience article ponders on fish's sentiency, and, well, see how 'Stephen Glover Rowe' and 'Jesse Tronier III' react:

The irrationality of humanity. I applaud Ryan for trying. But in the world of illeterate Jesse Tronier III's and Stephen Glover Rowes, trying doesn't automatically lead to results.

The main problem seems to be that fish are not cute. Jesse Tronier doesn't go 'aww' when looking at one. Not only are fish underwater, but they are also small and ugly.

Not all fish though. Not even Gordon Ramsay would question a shark's sentiency, yet a shark is just as much of a fish as a little goldfish. Sharks simply look prettier and more impressive.

Fish are different from us, but I'm also pretty different from Barack Obama. Still, on the most fundamental level we're all very similar.

Maybe the whole question of whether fish feel mammal-style pain is irrelevant? They clearly have sentience and cognition. It doesn't have to be identical to ours. Fish are also pretty intelligent, but their intelligence is different from our intelligence. It should still matter.

It is biologically logical to assume Barack Obama feels pain.

Pain is one of the most primary abilities in animals. Without it, you're in trouble. Saying that a fish cannot feel pain simply because "it doesn't have a neocortex" is like saying it cannot breathe because it doesn't have lungs. We need more wisdom.

Recent studies show that fish are surprisingly complex, intelligent animals with excellent memory; different individuals even have different personalities. Well, I don't need recent studies to know this. As a kid I spent hours and hours and hours studying the behaviour of fish, sitting on the lakeside throwing breadcrumbs in the water. I got to know different individuals. Some of them learned to trust that I wasn't anything that was going to hurt them. Some even found the courage to come and nibble my fingers. Others remained afraid of me.

The next day, when I'd come back, they would remember me. Remember how our game worked.

The whole question of these animals' sentience is absurd to anybody who's actually spent time with living fish, instead of just the normal piece of dead flesh on a plate.

Fish are fascinating, mysterious animals. It is heartbreaking what we do to them. ('We' and 'we'. I don't hurt them anymore. I wish nobody did.) We torture hundreds of billions of them every year, laughing like nothing happened, simply because we are too lazy to empathise with something so ugly, something so underwater.

That's it. The reason why we struggle to see fish as sentient vertebrates is quite simply that they're so fucking ugly. They're so different from us mammals. They don't scream when we hurt them. They don't look at us with puppy eyes. It's as stupid and sentimental as that. It applies to humans just as well: the cuter you are, the more important they consider you.

Shit. Sometimes I hate us.

Fear is fun.

In theory, it is possible to hunt 'ethically', without inflicting major suffering on the animal. But is there a way to fish ethically? Perhaps. But that's not something too many of us are doing. Industrial fishing and fish farming especially is unimaginable torture show. There are very few things that I find as disturbing as the thought of a human being treating a fish like crap, laughing joyously, completely unaware of what they're doing. "It's just a fucking fish, eh?"

In terms of inflicted suffering, the fishing industry is undoubtedly one of the darkest crimes on the planet. Many people would disagree with the way the commercial fishing industry treats the animals, but we the Private People aren't innocent either. We fish the animals with hooks for fun and then throw them back in the water. Then we do it again, and again, and again. We put them in nightmarish little bowls where they can only swim in an endless circle. When we get bored of them, we flush them down the toilet, sometimes while they're still alive.

So, what does science say? After all, the whole question about the sentience of fish is deeply childish: we're asking it just so that somebody would shout "NO, OF COURSE NOT" and save us from feeling guilty when we drag the creatures out of their water or factory farm them in hellish conditions.

The question about the sentience of fish is a complex one. Mostly because it's very difficult for us human primates to fully understand creatures that are so different from us. To us, fish are like aliens. Should we respect aliens? Should we be nice to them?

The group of scientists that are still clinging to the idea that ‘fish just possibly couldn’t feel pain’ are basing their beliefs on the fact that ‘the brain of fish is just so different from that of humans’. This is the only (I repeat: only!) argument of people like James D. Rose, a fisherman who's protecting his conscience at the expense of billions of sentient individuals. He's virtually stomping on scientific research and destroying the whole ethical conversation by shouting "their brain is different, their brain is different!" every time somebody makes scientific progress.

The brain of fish is different from that of humans. So what? Of course it’s different. That doesn't mean anything yet. The brains of fish have things that our brains don’t have, and our brains have things that their brains don’t have. We’re different animals. This doesn’t change the fact that we are all highly developed vertebrates.

What about the future? Once again, I believe in in vitro technology. In the future, people will still eat 'fish', but it will have nothing to do with actual animals. When people stop eating animals and the fishing industry practically disappears (and the general relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom changes fundamentally), the idea of doing this stuff for fun may begin to be considered unnecessary and barbaric and 'gross'. Fish bowls will become illegal. People will no longer have the psychological need to make themselves believe that fish are just swimming plants. The bad guys will eventually lose the battle, like they always do.

This is how human societies function. Trust me. I know. I've watched them for hundreds of years.

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Luckily, science already has its rising heroes:

"15-year-old schoolboy from Australia claimed to have conclusively disproved the myth that a fish's memory span was only three seconds.

Rory Stokes, a student at the Australian Science and Mathematics School in Adelaide, placed a beacon in a fish tank at feeding time each day and measured the time it took for fish to swim to it to obtain food.

The time taken reduced dramatically over a three week period, from a minute to a few seconds, after which Rory removed the beacon.

Six days later, he put it back in the water and, despite not seeing it for almost a week, the fish swam to it in 4.4 seconds, showing they had remembered the association between food and the beacon for at least six days.

'We are told that a goldfish has a memory span of less than three seconds… I wanted to challenge this theory as I believe it is a myth intended to make us feel less guilty about keeping fish in small tanks,' Rory said."

In your face, J. D. Rose.