The surprisingly profound debate over whether fish feel pain |
What must it feel like to be a fish — to glide weightlessly through the sea, to draw breath from water, to be (if one is lucky) oblivious to the parched terrestrial world above?
Maybe you suspect there isn’t much to fish — and you could hardly be blamed for it. For centuries, Western natural philosophy maligned sea creatures as primitive, dim-witted, perhaps not even conscious. It’s a prejudice that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, whose scala naturae ranked fishes near the bottom of the hierarchy of existence. According to Plato, fish were characterized by “the lowest depths of ignorance.”
Inside this story
• Fish are often dismissed as alien and simple, which makes it easy to overlook the true complexity of their lives and the massive numbers in which we use them.
• Whether or not fish can feel pain remains surprisingly contested, because subjective experiences are very hard to prove.
• The keys to understanding the evidence that fish feel pain, and why some scientists remain skeptical.
• How clashing paradigms have shaped the way we understand animal consciousness, from the Scientific Revolution to the present.
• Why “can fish feel pain?” may be, in the end, the wrong question.
This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
And so it remains today: Humans use fishes in far greater numbers than we do land animals — for food, for amusement as pets, and more — but our species shows strikingly little interest in what these experiences might be like for them. We even use fish as bywords for stupidity and poor brain function, like the proverbial goldfish mind that resets every three seconds — a myth fabricated out of thin air.
But I should speak for myself. Although I’m professionally obsessed with the ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I’ve given little thought to the massive class of animals that we call fish. I’ve hardly written a word about the hundreds of billions killed — quite brutally — by the commercial fishing and fish farming industries every year, nor much considered why it is that aquatic animals are treated as an afterthought to those who live on land.
Fish are hard to empathize with. They lack facial expressions we can readily understand, their bodies are scaly and cold to the touch, and although they make plenty of sounds to communicate with one another, we generally can’t hear them. Their entire world — built on senses and signals that we land-bound creatures cannot access — is as alien to us as ours no doubt is to them.
“We know very, very little about their day-to-day lives,” Becca Franks, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, told me. “Rather than seeing that big blank murky fogginess as a mystery that is waiting to be unveiled…there’s a cultural expectation that their lives are simple and not interesting.”
In recent decades, however, our aperture on marine life has widened tremendously. Scientific advances have increasingly shown that we’ve misjudged fish. They have complex social relationships and cognitive abilities, maintain long-term memories, and use tools. Octopuses — invertebrates with even more genetic distance from humans than fish — have become international celebrities for their intelligence. The more we attempt to look into the minds of animals farther and farther from us on the evolutionary tree, the more we discover how much we’ve been underestimating them.
Yet even as it has shed new light onto the piscine creatures that populate most of our planet, the science of fish minds has been mired in debate over a startlingly, deceptively simple question: Can fish feel pain?
It might sound weird that a capacity as basic as pain is still contested in animals who can distinguish between individual human faces and migrate thousands of miles. But the question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively. And so, even as experimental evidence that fish experience pain has accumulated over the last quarter-century, some prominent skeptics continue to doubt it.
The great fish pain debate shows us how scientific knowledge is shaped not just by linear progress, but also by historical contingency, cultural biases, philosophical roadblocks, and internal ethical paradoxes. And it reflects back a story about us humans — our endeavor to find sentience in our fellow creatures, and our countervailing impulse to deny morally important qualities in them.
Perhaps nowhere are these competing tendencies more evident than in our attempts to understand fish, alien as they are to our warm-blooded, mammalian selves.
What we talk about when we talk about fish........