{"id":806,"date":"2015-03-09T14:40:08","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T18:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/?p=806"},"modified":"2015-03-09T15:52:24","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T19:52:24","slug":"fish-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/?p=806","title":{"rendered":"Fish (Not Just Fido) Are Smart, Feel Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>

Do a quick search for \u201cNew York Times\u201d and \u201cfish\u201d and, aside from a roasted bass and fennel recipe, you\u2019ll find some pretty foul news. Recent reports suggest that fish are, among other things, mislabeled, on the verge of extinction, saturated with toxins, banned from being caught in certain regions, genetically modified, trapped with dragnets, infected with lice, flowing with mercury, and labeled as \u201csustainably\u201d caught when, alas, they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

But what you won\u2019t find is perhaps the most important recent discovery scientists have ever reported about fish: they\u2019re smart.<\/p>\n

Ethically, fish swim in grey territory. Most decent people agree that that the land-based creatures we domesticate for food not only feel pain but live with some level consciousness. Based on this quality, many people have decided to think seriously about how to handle them, or even whether or not we should handle them at all, much less eat them.<\/p>\n

Whatever ethical pricks we experience rarely extend to fish. Partly because they literally lurk beneath the surface of our observation, fish have yet to enter this privileged category of analysis. Could it be that the distinction drawn between, say, fish and pigs is as morally capricious as the one drawn between dogs and pigs? Could fish matter more than we\u2019ve ever considered?<\/p>\n

Considerable evidence indicates they do.<\/p>\n

a) The oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t deliberately eat a grouper any more than I\u2019d eat a cocker spaniel.\u201d Fish, she explains, \u201care sensitive, they have personalities; they hurt when they\u2019re wounded.\u201d<\/p>\n

b) The German neuroscientist Stefan Shuster agrees, saying that, \u201cpeople don\u2019t expect much from fish but that\u2019s where they\u2019re wrong.\u201d \u201cFish,\u201d he claims, \u201care capable of much more than people think.\u201d<\/p>\n

c) The fish biologist Victoria Braithwaite told a reporter, \u201cWe\u2019re concerned about the welfare of chickens, pigs, and cows on farms. Why not fish?\u201d \u00a0Her recent book,\u00a0Do Fish Feels Pain?\u00a0<\/em>answers that question with clear implications for those who think eating fish, ethically speaking, is a done deal.<\/p>\n

Research on fish sentience is new. But in a short period of time\u2014say 20 years\u2014a welter of evidence has emerged to demonstrate that fish teach each other tricks, are savvy social learners, make situational (rather than just instinctive) decisions, and can adopt the perspective of other fish\u2014something serious enough to be deemed a \u201ctheory of mind\u201d by those who evaluate such things.\u00a0These animals swim the seas with a certain level of intellectual sea cred.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that scientists who study animal cognition\u2014not to mention the journalists who write about it\u2014are professionally wary about attributing consciousness to the animals they study. It\u2019s can be a dangerous move, an unflattering mark of sentimental anthropomorphism and, regrettably, it can have dire consequences for one\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

It is, therefore, all the more significant that a team of animal scientists, writing in Applied Animal Behaviour Science<\/em>, surveyed the evidence and declared, \u201cThis review of the anatomy, physiology, and behaviour of fish suggests that they are more likely to be sentient than not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let the scholarly understatement fool you. The mere mention of \u201cfish\u201d and \u201csentience\u201d in the same breath by a group of prominent scientists makes the point loud and clear. Fish think. They feel pain. They suffer.<\/p>\n

This matters.<\/p>\n

Regrettably, too many of us, even animal lovers, act as if it doesn\u2019t. Inversely related to the rapidly growing evidence of fish intelligence is our willingness to accept the implications. It\u2019s hard for humans to entertain the idea of treating fish with moral consideration.<\/p>\n

Not only do fish hide under water, but when we do have a chance to encounter them, or maybe even interact with them, it\u2019s usually while they jerk on the end of a line or do endless laps around a fish tank. Under these circumstances\u2014well, under any circumstances actually\u2014we lack the opportunity to do something essential for connecting empathetically with fish: Visually assess their emotions.<\/p>\n

Walleyed and lacking eyebrows, fish\u2014who did not evolve in mutual interaction with humans\u2014do not behave towards humans in ways that incline us to responsibly anthropomorphize them into creatures with recognizable feelings.\u00a0 This necessary failure to see eye-to-eye stands in sharp contrast to dogs, animals who anthropologists theorize may have evolved eyebrows for the sole purpose of making advantageous emotional connections to the humans who have generally nurtured them and, with rare exception, have decided not to eat them, in part, because of those imploring, expressive eyes.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that, when it comes to fish, compassion is completely absent from the human heart. In 2009, a television reporter in Denmark, in an act of unaccountable stupidity, poured a small amount of shampoo into a fish tank to demonstrate its toxicity. The minute the fish went belly up the public wrath came slamming down. The reporter was sued for causing \u201cunnecessary suffering\u201d and the judge condemned her for \u201cdeliberately commit[ing] an act of cruelty to animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately she was exonerated because, as her lawyer noted, \u201cFish are killed by suffocation in industrial fisheries and we throw live lobsters into boiling water, but we don\u2019t press charges against fishermen or restaurant owners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is not such a bad point.<\/p>\n

And as it suggests, the Denamrk anecdote is the exception that proves the rule: Fish don\u2019t measure up on our fickle moral scales. Making matters more difficult for the defender of fish sentience, those scales are tipped by entrenched cultural perceptions of fishing as an activity that promotes bonding and relaxation.<\/p>\n

\u201cFishing,\u201d explains Connecticut\u2019s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, \u201cis wholesome family fun.\u201d Vacation packages often cater to \u201cfather-son fishing trips\u201d and it\u2019s a longtime practice for men in particular to escape the gruel of daily life and pound their chests while catching fish on a boat with a lot of beer on it. In Hemingway\u2019s\u00a0Old Man and the Sea<\/em>, the anonymous narrator defines nothing short of his manhood vis-\u00e0-vis a marlin he aims to kill. The earliest picture of my dad and me shows me holding up a string of trout. It hangs in the hallway of my parents\u2019 house on a wall of familial warmth.<\/p>\n

That picture has meaning. Through dead fish it conveys human love. And thus I\u2019m reminded that our culture of accommodating and celebrating fish exploitation cannot casually be brushed aside. The animal advocate cannot simply declare \u201cfish are sentient\u201d and expect a previously unquestioned habit that imparts immense human pleasure to screech to a halt.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0consumers—and the journalists who bring them the news—should realize\u00a0that fish do in fact suffer. The world\u2019s leading authority on fish pain, Victoria Braithwaite, has become so convinced that fish suffer that she\u2019s concluded, somewhat reluctantly, that \u201cwe should extend welfare considerations to fish.\u201d \u00a0An estimated 500,000,000,000 fish die a painful death every year to feed humans food we don\u2019t need. Regardless of\u00a0what the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>fails to say about the matter, that pain and suffering means as much to a fish as it does to an animal who can look us in the eyes and capture our hearts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do a quick search for \u201cNew York Times\u201d and \u201cfish\u201d and, aside from a roasted bass and fennel recipe, you\u2019ll find some pretty foul news. Recent reports suggest that fish are, among other things, mislabeled, on the verge of extinction, saturated with toxins, banned from being caught in certain regions, genetically modified, trapped with dragnets, infected with lice, flowing with mercury, and labeled as \u201csustainably\u201d caught when, alas, they\u2019re not. But what you won\u2019t find is perhaps the most important recent discovery scientists have ever reported about fish: they\u2019re smart. Ethically, fish swim in grey territory. Most decent people agree that that the land-based creatures we domesticate for food not only feel pain but live with some level consciousness. Based on this quality, many people have decided to think seriously about how to handle them, or even whether or not we should handle them at all, much less eat them. Whatever ethical pricks we experience rarely extend to fish. Partly because they literally lurk beneath the surface of our observation, fish have yet to enter this privileged category of analysis. Could it be that the distinction drawn between, say, fish and pigs is as morally capricious as the one drawn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[126,127],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-animal-sentience","tag-fish-pain"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/horse-eye-jacks-1029395-ga.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p54Vzk-d0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypitchfork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}