Fishy pain

I have been prompted by the latest newsletter from the people at Dana to think about fishy pain again.
Hitherto my interest has been in whether fish can be considered to be conscious of pain or not and on that point the answer seems to remain quite possibly. They seem to have a lot of the right sort of neural machinery and they seem to exhibit the right sort of behaviour. On the other hand, despite sharing lots of structures and lots of machinery with us, fish are also very different from us and it is hard to be sure one way or the other, despite the efforts reported at references 3 and 4. My own forced choice would remain for some sort of dim consciousness for large bony fish; well short of what one expects of a healthy, adult human, but something nonetheless.

But today, I start to wonder whether there is anything we ought to be doing about it, given that collectively we kill large numbers of fish without much regard to the manner of their going. A lack of regard which would, these days, rightly be regarded as a disgrace if the animals in question were poultry, never mind pigs, sheep or cows.

The 24th May piece in the Washington Post to which Dana sent me, by one Tim Carmen, suggests that things are moving on. Despite the robust, no-nonsense attitudes of many sports and commercial fishermen, there is change, with both electrical stunning and captive bolt guns being used for some of the larger farmed fish. Some of this is driven by decently killed fish tasting better than it would otherwise.

However, whatever we might do or  might not do, a lot more indecent killing will carry on in the wild – from where I associated to a sentence in the hawk book noticed reference 7 about the rabbit dying at some point during the process of the goshawk eating it. What is the point of our fussing about the fate of a few farmed catfish if the rest of the animal world carries on red in tooth and claw?

To which my answer is that I am reasonably clear that we are all damaged if we tolerate the indecent killing of animals, even in the pursuit of food or some other creditable purpose. With there being more damage if we are actually doing the killing ourselves or it we are doing it for sport. As some Christians might say, we are all God’s creatures and we ought to show each other some respect. With some of the arguments here running parallel to arguments used against capital punishment and torture, along the lines that we don’t want the sort of people who make their living doing this sort of thing on the payroll or living on our street. A problem once solved in India by getting untouchables to do the dirty work.

PS: with the illustration being a boat loaded with mullet near the fish farm in the Crimean village of Olenivka (Pavel Rebrov/Reuters).

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/01/more-fishy-thoughts.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Victoria+Braithwaite.

Reference 3: Do Fish Feel Pain? – Victoria Braithwaite – 2010.

Reference 4: Pain in Aquatic Animals - Sneddon, Lynne – 2015.

Reference 5: http://dana.org/.

Reference 6: on.dana.org/FishBrains. Paste this into your browser and you get taken to the right place at the Washington Post, a place which does not seem to be available if you try to go there direct.

Reference 7: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.