do fish feel pain apr 2010

[...]... Stings and Vinegar: The Evidence That Fish Feel Pain 46 4 Suffer the Little Fishes? 75 5 Drawing the Line 114 6 Why It Took So Long to Ask the Fish Pain Question—and Why It Must Be Asked 136 7 Looking to the Future 153 185 191 Bibliography Index xi This page intentionally left blank 1 The Problem I n 2003 the results from a study investigating whether fish feel pain were published Almost overnight the... whether fish feel pain Is it because we think we know already, or because we don’t like to think about the 3 t he probl e m consequences of concluding that they suffer? Or is it because it’s a very hard question to answer? That it certainly is: the question challenges both scientific and philosophical ideas and it forces us to think about pain as a mechanism— what it is and how it works When we are in pain. .. mechanism— what it is and how it works When we are in pain it hurts—we suffer Do other animals share this ability to experience negative feelings? Several researchers argue that feelings and emotions are exclusive to humans and dismiss the idea that animals can suffer Yet we accord pets and farm animals welfare rights Asking if fish feel pain challenges established ideas; it is akin to opening the proverbial... because to show that fish suffer we need to ask whether they are sentient do they experience feelings and emotions, and if they do, does that mean they are also conscious? Can we ever really know what another animal actually experiences? This is a question philosophers have pondered a great deal and it turns out to be central to the fish pain debate In the mid-1970s an essay written by the philosopher Thomas... against pain perception in fish, they had been recognized as a group that should be treated in ways that minimize their potential pain and suffering Given that fish are already legally recognized as requiring protection with regard to animal experiments, it is all the more curious that our 2003 article on pain in fish attracted so much attention from the world’s media Why did headlines reporting fish feel pain. .. different—to be blunt, it looks naked This is because fish do not have a neocortex, the grey matter that gives our brains its characteristic, crinkly, convoluted appearance This missing structure plays a central role in the fish pain debate—those who argue fish cannot feel pain consider the neocortex to be essential for an animal to experience feelings Certainly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies,... time might be essential if you live in a dangerous environment where hungry mouths lurk in the shadows It is an important ability—and you don’t need a neocortex to do it Fish might share similar physiological mechanisms with other vertebrates and exhibit brain laterality like our own, but conventional wisdom portrays them as foolish creatures with a three-second memory This view is wrong In Chapter 4,... cautious approach that in essence boils down to three separate questions These built on each other in such a way that it only made sense to proceed to the next question if the answer to the last one was found to be true We began by simply asking, do fish have the necessary receptors and nerve fibres to detect painful events? Next we wanted to determine whether a potentially painful stimulus triggered activity... the possibility of pain in fish While it is readily accepted that we should protect another human being, even newborn babies with a still-developing nervous system, the clarity of that decision begins to wane when we consider how to respond to an injured animal There is without doubt a considerable distance between wanting to protect and alleviate pain in a person and wanting to do so in a fish But the... consciousness remains unresolved Nevertheless Nagel’s opinions are useful for the fish pain debate—we may never have the opportunity to fully recognize what fish experience, but we should not deny them a capacity for subjective feelings just because we cannot experience their 8 t he probl e m feelings ourselves In many contexts we don’t Consider the permits and training my colleagues and I needed to obtain for .