Do Fish Feel Pain

[Leon Roskilly]

Hereford_angler:

It is obvious they feel pain. Ever had a pike flick about when the hook is being removed?

And so do chestnuts!!

 

Put them on a pan and heat them over a fire, and they start to scream.

 

Some will even leap right out of the fire in their agony.

 

Cutting them disables them a bit, stops the blighters trying to escape, but they tend to scream a lot more when they get hot!

 

Tight Lines - leon

[Graham E]

Apologies for those that have heard this example before. I had this example quoted in the Daily Mail in response to an article ref Cruel fishermen.

 

Many years ago I wanted to see if fish felt pain.

 

I caught on a hook and released the same salmon parr SEVEN times on the trot.

Caught, released, back to the weed tail in full visibility etc.

 

If they feel pain the memory span is about 1 minute!

 

Graham

[Guest Ferret1959]

I haven't read the report yet but I have been fishing for over 35 years and don't think fish feel pain in the same way as mammals or birds.

Either that or their memory is so short it doesn't really matter.

How many times have you caught a fish from a shoal near your feet, chucked back the fish only to see it going straight for food again?

I don't think we will ever understand the feeling of pain for another animal properly unless we can comunicate with them on an understandable level.

Look at a four legged animal beit a horse, dog or say a fox I know they feel pain but they would run for miles on a broken leg but a human would hardly move.

 

I may be rambling but some of you may get my drift.

[Leon Roskilly]

Sometimes a person suffers damage to the area of brain where we register pain, and cannot feel any pain. Sometimes children are born with that part of their brain damaged.

 

The result is that they can rest with a foot against a heated radiator etc, and burn themselves terribly without realising it.

 

Children who grow with no sense of pain, have no guilt about causing damage to others, they simply do not understand.

 

The part of the brain which registers pain in mammals, simply doesn't exist in fish or amphibians.

 

Hawaii is an island where mammals never evolved, so you won't find any plants that have developed a pain causing strategy, such as thistles or nettles.

 

You'll not find any plants or creatures below the waterline that have developed a pain causing strategy either.

 

Underwater spines and poisons may cause us pain, but they have been developed as physical barriers, or to kill and disable their intended victim, not simply to send a fish on it's way through the strategy of administering a sharp prick or sting.

 

Pike are not deterred by a perch's spines, a stickleback may deter the attention of a kingfisher, but it's spines simply act as a method of preventing engorgement when it finds itself in the mouth of a perch.

 

As humans, it is part of our makeup to try to see the world as others might see it. That makes us good hunters and good warriors.

 

It also helps us to understand each other.

 

Our pain has a social dimension, our friends will avoid pressing against our wounds, will come to our aid when we scream.

 

Many people tell of suffering horrendous injury, coping with a survival situation without being aware of any pain. Until they feel that they are in safe and caring hands! Then the pain floods in.

 

We are creatures with complex learning capabilities, and pain plays a great part in this.

 

But we simply aren't fish. And fish lack the social, psychological and physical components that create the experience we interpret as pain.

 

Fish have no need of pain. Their environment is worn smooth, with no sharp sticks or fire, no falls or stumbles, no sharp objects to be sat upon. They float and glide with negligible risk of physical injury.

 

It's a human trait to judge other creatures perceptions according to our own.

 

With fish (or chestnuts), when we do that, we find ourselves way off beam.

 

Fish simply cannot feel pain. If they did they don't have the capacity to 'care' about it. And if they did, they have no way of storing the experience, or suffering any psychological or social component.

 

Tight Lines - leon

 

Neil Boyce, reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Scientist (6 Feb 1999) writes:-

 

Painful choices

 

FROGS could help resolve one of the toughest dilemmas in animal experimentation. Because they lack the brain structures which allow mammals to feel pain, they might be used as a less contentious way of testing new painkilling drugs.

 

The crux of the problem is that you can’t find out how well an analgesic works without first inflicting pain. In a typical experiment you would compare how long it takes for a rat on a hotplate to raise one of its hind legs before and after it receives a new drug.

 

Now Craig Stevens of Oklahoma StateUniversity in Tulsa has developed the first amphibian model for testing pain-killers. He drips acetic acid on the hind legs of the leopard-spotted frog, Rana pipiens, and times how long it takes the frog to wipe the acid away. His studies show that well-known painkillers such as the opiates morphine and codeine have similar effects on this response as they do in the rat hotplate test.

 

“It does have an ethical advantage,” says Stevens. “Frogs don’t have any of the structures that in humans and other mammals are used for pain perception.” They have no limbic cortex, which is responsible for emotional responses like dread and fear, and also can’t be conditioned to learn to expect the acid application. “They don’t jump away. They don’t show any of the fear responses,” he says.

 

“If it proved to answer the same questions, pharmaceuticals companies will be embracing that,” predicts Kerry Taylor of the Southern Research Institute in Frederick Maryland. Stevens also says he can buy and keep six frogs for the price of one rat, so his model is cheap as well.

 

http://www.newscientist.com

[davidP]

Personally I've never been able to work out why people place so much importance on whether they feel pain or not. Pain is a human concept and we can't even say for certain if other mammals feel it in the same way, let along cold blooded creatures with different nervous systems. And until the day we can learn to communicate with them or turn into them there's no way we'll ever know. If someone could prove it definitivly then would it make any difference to me? Quite frankly no, I don't think it would. I already know that I cause the fish some distress when I hook it, but that distress is short-lived and the fish is returned to carry on with it's existance (which is often thanks to anglers in the first place). The vast majority of fish seldom if ever get caught and so live out their lives in good water conditions (often thanks to anglers) with a steady supply of food (thanks to anglers again). How many fish would exist in this country if it wasn't for anglers?

 

So to me the 'do fish feel pain' argument is non-issue anyway - another example of people applying human emotions to non-human creatures.

[Peter Waller]

Hereford_angler:

If fish dont feel pain the bolt rig would not work. It is obvious they feel pain. Ever had a pike flick about when the hook is being removed? Or a bleak jump about like crazy trying to get off the hook when being swung in? This guy talks c**p!

Which guy talks c**p?!

 

Pain, or instinctive behaviour as they try to escape?

[Jim Roper]

Do fish experience fear?

 

Jim Roper

[Guest Ferret1959]

I would have thought they sensed fear as they swim like hell when a pike is after them.

 

Just a question on the pain theory...

Why do worms wriggle when you stick a hook in them????

And why do slugs and snail hate salt???????

[phonebush]

I have a curious question. Why does it matter?

Phone

[Leon Roskilly]

Jim Roper:

Do fish experience fear?

 

Jim Roper

A reaction is different to an emotion.

 

When a car backfires next to you, in an instant you hunch, and straighten the hairs on the back of your neck, andrenalin starts to flood your nervous system and prepare you for fight or flight.

 

At this point, no emotion has yet kicked in.

 

All of these reactions are caused by firing of neurons in the primitive brain (mammalian brains are composed of seperate structures, grouped as they evolved. The primitive brain, that fish have, the reptilian brain, where emotion's such as fear and dread and a sense of 'I' first appear, and the mammalian brain where the much more complex 'higher' functions are encountered).

 

The message created by the sound of the bang first go to the parts of the brain where instinct rules. In a situation of real danger, there is no time to assess and decide.

 

A split second later, but after you have hunched, the message hits the reptilian brain. Now you feel fear and dread. Then onto the the cortex where you assess the situation, decide it's only a car backfiring, smile in a nonchalent way that fools no one, and continue walking.

 

All a fish's brain structure is capable of is a pre-programed reaction to a stimuli, evolved through survival.

 

A fish out of water wriggles, because when it is trapped by a falling water level, or dropped on the bank by a predatory bird. Wriggling can help to slide it over mud into a deeper pool, or send it tumbling down the bank back into the water.

 

Fish that don't wriggle die, fish that do wriggle have a chance to live, to breed, and pass on the wriggling instinct.

 

Fish that don't respond to a predator's rush by fleeing/hiding get eaten, fish that instinctively flee a sudden shadow, have a better chance of passing on that instinct to their fry.

 

But they cannot feel emotion, like fear and dread. Their brains lack the structures where these primitive emotions first evolved.

 

At least until they leave the water, and thereby need to evolve a more complex brain structure, and become a reptile.

 

Human's have a brain that allows them to have an imagination.

 

Even so, we have great difficulty in imagining that any creature doesn't experience the world as we do.

 

Mrs pike packing her fry off to school in the mornings, sitting in her ambush lair dreading what might happen to them in the wicked underwater world, knowing that few fish ever die of old age, or even live to adult-hood, and that none has the capability to care a jot what happens to another.

 

Whereas we humans, because of the way our brains have evolved, and the instincts we have developed, can't help but feel sorry for the predicament of fish!

 

Because our instinctive reactions are so associated with our capability for emotion, we have difficulty in separating the two, or imaginining that other creatures can have one without the other.

 

Tight Lines - leon

 

[ 26. December 2002, 07:53 AM: Message edited by: Leon Roskilly ]