Do Fish Feel Pain

[mpbdsnu]

Excellent posts Leon!

 

Personally, I would like to see this in 'article' form?

[Hereford_angler]

hmmmmm. I think you are starting to sway my views.. I have heard goldfish have a STM (short term memory) span of about 10 seconds. Fish do feel stress (fact) so possibly fear and pain? Im open minded.

 

P.S. Do chessnuts really do that!

[Leon Roskilly]

Hereford_angler:

hmmmmm. I think you are starting to sway my views.. I have heard goldfish have a STM (short term memory) span of about 10 seconds. Fish do feel stress (fact) so possibly fear and pain? Im open minded.

 

P.S. Do chessnuts really do that!  

Stress?

 

That term is used in lots of ways.

 

We use it mostly in the context of emotional or psychological stress, the sort you get when there's talk of redundancy at work, when your partner starts talking about the need to decorate most of the house as the weather comes just right for fishing, when you realise that you've forgotten her birthday, just as you turn into your drive.

 

That kind of stress can cause physical stress, and perhaps long term physical damage when it is prolonged over time.

 

Fish don't suffer emotional stress, they never worry about anything!

 

Then there's physiological stress.

 

When the body's physical systems come under stress. You can measure that in various ways as chemicals enter the bloodstream, the blood quickens, oxygen is in short supply.

 

The kind of 'stress' that athletes experience when they race.

 

Such 'stress' is perfectly normal, and the body (fish or athlete) is designed to cope with it, and to recover quickly (though medical accounts of the detail of such normal stress can be made to sound horrific when it suits an argument!)

 

If such stress is prolonged, then real damage starts to occur, compromising the body's ability to recover and possibly leading to long term health problems.

 

A fish too long out of the water, an environment short of oxygen etc. These things can compromise a fish's welfare.

 

But again the human and fish's pyschological and emotional response to such 'stress' are entirely different.

 

Fish have no pyschological or emotional response to such physical stress!

 

They either recover quickly, recover slowly, or don't.

 

They don't have the capacity to 'care' about what's happening, their bodies just respond, as they are designed to do.

 

In most cases, when physical 'stress' is caused by angling practices (like an athlete recovering from a race) they are soon physically recovered without any mental scars. Play a fish in, release it and it stays still whilst it's body regains equilibrium, oxygen levels return to normal. Then it's taking bait again! (I've caught the same fish within minutes of releasing it/losing it on numerous occasions!)

 

Fish held crowded in a keepnet, in warm oxygen-poor water for too long, may succumb and die. As can pike, too long on the bank after a hard fight etc.

 

When we talk about avoiding undue 'stress' these are the kind of things we mean.

 

A physical response to a physical situation.

 

No pain, fear, or anxiety involved.

 

Unlike the kind of 'stress' that mammals can experience. Perhaps we should use a different word to avoid such confusion.

 

Particularly when talking about such things to people who are convinced that fish are just like us, apart from a few obvious physical differences!

 

I blame Walt Disney and the Little Mermaid!

 

Tight Lines - leon

 

ps Try roasting a few chestnuts, that's fun

[poledark]

Leon, in your usual highly convincing way could you please explain what effect the ability to learn, as shown in Carp for instance, would have on their fear/feeling stress levels.

 

It could be argued that carp learn to avoid certain baits,(the ones they get caught on)because of the fear/discomfort/stress or simply the utter humiliation ( ) it causes them.

As an example of their learning power I would quote my experiences whilst surface fishing with bread crust during the 1950's...you always had a couple of days at the beginning of each season when you could catch, but the fish very quickly wised up again and would refuse bread for the rest of the season.

 

Interestingly, it was not neccessary to catch them all, just a couple was enough to make all the carp in the lake act "scared"

 

Den

[Leon Roskilly]

poledark:

Leon, in your usual highly convincing way could you please explain what effect the ability to learn, as shown in Carp for instance, would have on their fear/feeling stress levels.

This is a hard one to get across, but there is a dividing line between what's called 'habituation' and 'learning'.

 

Even some primitive single-celled creatures display 'habituation' when they eventually 'learn' not to come into contact with a charged electrode.

 

They don't even have a nervous system, let alone a brain!

 

I'm not convinced about the argument that fish 'learn' to avoid a particular bait either.

 

Fish do swap their diet quite naturally and sometimes become pre-occupied feeding on a readily abundant food supply to the exclusion of other foods.

 

Having limited brain processing power available, it makes sense for them to concentrate on finding the readily available food, ignoring more scattered food items.

 

So tench stop biting on maggots when the weed becomes full of tiny snails, trout can only be taken on a certain fly, and pike will only have perch-pattern lures.

 

And as a pike angler, it's maddening to find that yesterday's hot lure isn't working today, until you find that they've gone off fire-tiger and have now moved onto fluoro-yellow. But it's significant that later on the week they are back on fire-tiger.

 

Did they 'smarten-up' to fire-tiger, but then forget? Or did fire-tiger suit the light conditions of both the days that pattern was working?

 

When carp stop taking tutti-fruti and everyone starts using liver and garlic, was it because they wised-up? Or did word go around the lake that the fish had wised-up to tutti-fruti and no-one used it for the rest of the season?

 

On a water I fish, you used to catch bream close in, but then the long casters started getting groundbait out further and further.

 

Nowdays you have to be able to cast a long way to contact with the bream shoals

 

The wisdom is that the fish have followed the groundbait out.

 

Yet when the same happens on a carp water, the wisdom is that the carp (perhaps being a smarter fish than bream) feel safer out toward the middle of the lake away from where the anglers sit (and hammer banksticks into the ground!).

 

Did your carp continue feeding on surface flotsam, only avoiding surface bread? Or had they found a richer source of food, down on the bottom, as the snail and bloodworm population multiplied, and where they instinctively felt safer from fish-eating eagles?

 

Yet I'm convinced that the goldfish in my tank knew that when I took the can of Tetra fish food off the shelf, it was time to gather in the corner where the food would come in! And there have been experiments where carp were trained to pull a string and ring a bell when they wanted feeding.

 

Sea-bass can be trained to come to a feeding bell, and be released into an estuary, coming to the bell up to 6 months after they were last fed to that sound.

 

So, even primitive single-celled creatures can be taught to avoid an 'unpleasant' stimulus.

 

It's of evolutionary benefit for any creature to take advantage of new situations, and to avoid unpleasant ones.

 

But that's a long way from human learning, where we not only 'learn' what works and doesn't, but can figure out why!

 

And IMHO that's what makes a good angler.

 

One who doesn't grasp at the first explanation that seems reasonable to him/her, in the light of their human experience, but worries at the experience from a non-human point of view and considers and tests all other possible explanations, staying ahead of the crowd.

 

Tight Lines - leon

[phonebush]

Leon,

I like the extraordinary well thought out style you use to make the issues understandable.

 

The more fundamental question is the why. Why do we need to know if fish feel pain? It is, by a huge margin, morally acceptable to fish, pain or no pain. Inflicting pain is a moral issue. Until the preponderance of a given participating society finds an activity or practice unacceptable, individual judgment or government should/can not impose effective laws based on morality. Laws should dictate issues like on which side of the road to drive. For example, look at the immense failure the era of alcoholic beverage probation in the US had on a moral society. Or, inflicting pain on non-believers and back sliders was once the domain of the moral Church (before America’s time). Morality, to a large extent, changed Church practices.

 

Certainly compared to the human condition fish do NOT have the capability to “reason” (i.e. either I choose this/or I choose that with consequences) if indeed they learn at all. How to inflict pain on a 50 lb carp based on reasoning is, for the most part left to humanity.

Phone

[poledark]

Leon, I based my example of the learning capacity of carp on many years experience of surface stalking by myself and several friends. One can see the reaction of the fish and thus form a pretty good idea of what is happening. I cant say what goes on under the surface, and cant claim any useful experience of how other fish behave.

 

I do think that the experiences gained can claim to have a fairly accurate and "scientific" basis, it is after all the result of several thousand hours observation.

Further proof is added when one tries a different bait, in my case it was floating "cake", same line, same hooklink, same fish! The carp were unafraid of the new bait and were caught easily for a while, further changes were needed to maintain the catching.

 

Now my reasoning, and this is the basic idea behind all modern carp fishing, is that the carp do learn that eating certain foods can cause them discomfort in several ways.

Even if they are only capable of "reasoning" that one of the various effects of eating that bait will happen, then that is sufficient to cause them to avoid that bait.

 

But it does not stop there, on many occasions spread over maybe twenty years or more I ,and my colleagues of course, have seen evidence that carp are eating our bait (the robin red effect) but the fish are rarely caught.

The only ones which do get caught have slipped up and become a victim of the hair/bolt rig. Most thinking carp men will agree that the carp almost certainly test almost every bait that they pick up, and if it were not for the hair rig very very few big carp would be landed.

 

The effect of a new flavour or indeed a different bait entirely, Brazils for instance, can fool the fish to the point of stupidity, I prefer to reason that as they have never seen that bait, or tasted that flavour, then they have no need to fear it.

 

There must have been thousands of times that this scenario has been repeated on carp waters all over the country, and each time it happens it reinforces the argument that carp can learn the consequences of certain actions.

 

Barbel anglers will also tell you that it happens with barbel.

 

So what is happening in the carps brain? is it experiencing fear, or is it afraid of getting "hurt" again, it does not seem to be fear of the hook, after all a change of bait does not change the hook. At one time it was thought that it was the line or hooklink that scared them, but once again a simple change of bait is sufficient to fool them, and many modern rigs are thick, stiff, easily detected by the fish.

 

I would add one thing to this, I am basing this on evidence from fishing what are usually classed as big fish waters, where most of the fish have been known for many years, not the commercial heavily stocked waters,

Den

[Leon Roskilly]

phonebush:

It is, by a huge margin, morally acceptable to fish, pain or no pain.

Undoubtedly that is so in many parts of the world, certainly in most of the States where most modern Americans still take pride in their pioneer roots, and fishing and hunting is seen as natural human activities.

 

It was a little like that, and not so long ago, in the UK.

 

But like most of modern Western Europe, and increasingly in American cities where political power gathers, our population is becoming increasingly urbanised. We no longer buy recognisable animal parts for food (unless you have some knowledge of anatomy).

 

Increasingly 'cruelty' is becoming politically unacceptable, and consumers are turning more and more to 'cruelty' free products. (Just try buying fresh veal, or pate de foi-gras, in a non-specialist UK grocery outlet; cheap eggs from battery hens are also fast disappearing).

 

To most people, pain = cruelty.

 

‘Pain’ goes naturally with ‘suffering’. The two words can be used to mean the same.

 

And remember that coarse anglers nearly always return their catch (and pride themselves on returning their catch unharmed).

 

In Germany, you cannot do that. If you catch a fish that is above a minimum size, you must kill it. Fishing for food is morally acceptable - just (mainly because many vegetarians eat fish, and a trawler caught fish will suffer a more traumatic and extended death than a cleanly killed angled fish – assuming that you accept that a fish can suffer)

 

Many in the UK will support the proposition that pleasure fishing should be banned, when it is put to them that 'suffering' is caused to fish, simply for the pointless pleasure of anglers in catching them, then throwing them back again.

 

(That whole argument missing so much, like saying that the only point of going out to a posh resturant is to chew, or sex should be banished because we can now procreate by using a test tube!)

 

Even in the hunting and fishing culture of the States, you will hear the familiar phrase ‘If you ain’t gonna eat it, don’t mess with it’.

 

In the great fox-hunting debate, late in the day, the argument has been floated by pro-hunters that it is a Civil Liberty issue, that argument is now rapidly gaining strength as our political leadership is increasingly seen as manipulative and fond of control-freakery. And as we watch the protections of our liberty being peeled away under the guise of the fight against terrorism.

 

Recent polls show that an increasing number of people, now a majority, are against a complete ban on hunting with dogs, realising late that freedoms are being lost, and that the issues are more complex than previously presented. (Though many of the main players have long ago come off the fence, and are now slaves to their chosen dogma).

 

Whether or not fish feel pain will become important, no it will become central, once the antis really start to look toward angling as a ‘next target’. (Even now, they have their successes as various councils close council owned waters to angling, or increase measures to ensure that ‘suffering’ is reduced).

 

So, in the long term it is important to determine whether fish do or do not feel pain.

 

Though I suspect that debate will run and run and run.

 

Right at the start, even looking at human pain, it’s almost impossible to define it!

 

Being interested in the ‘Do fish feel pain debate’, I’ve read and listened to many scientific debates and definitions of ‘pain’.

 

Fascinating!

 

Though I’ll admit that 95% of the detail goes over my head, as I try to grasp the complex principles. (Try trawling the Internet, mostly research into defining human pain and how to alleviate it)

 

‘Pain’ one simple emotive word that we think we recognise, yet when it comes down to it, it describes a whole range of experiences from the ‘ow!’ of bumping an elbow, to the unbearable experience suffered at the hands of a master torturer.

 

Talk of fish feeling pain, and whether it’s right to allow that simply for an angler’s pleasure; on the one hand the angler’s mind encompasses the slight prick of a size 22 hook that may strain to be described as ‘discomfort’, whereas the anti will envisage the pain a human would experience, their mouth ripped open by a sadist’s meat hook.

 

Pain, sometimes acceptable, even when purposely visited upon seemingly our most vulnerable innocents. Our own children taken for an injection. And if the nurse is skilful, the child distracted, the needle is in and out as the child answers a distracting question (all they physical components of pain present, but totally irrelevant). And if the child catches sight of the needle going in, and yells out, then cries inconsolably? ‘Here, let mummy kiss it better’, works better than any powerful analgesic.

 

And therein lies the complexity of the debate. Human ‘pain’ is not a simple mechanical thing.

 

It’s a complex mixture of physical, social, emotional and intellectual ingredients that cannot be applied to fish.

 

Rip off a man’s arm in an accident, and the experience is likely to be unimaginably traumatic. Most animals will yelp, lick the wound, lie down for a while maybe, then get on with life, hardly noticing a missing limb if it is fed.

 

Fish? The winter edition of Lure Angler contained a picture of a lure-caught pike, that had most of it’s stomach previously ripped out by another pike, whose bite-mark measured 12 and a quarter inches across.

 

I would expect a man coming down the high street with his entrails hanging out to be in agony, not stopping by the hot-dog stand for a feed!

 

But getting such concepts over to the public is hard work, particularly when they are counter-intuitive and promoted by the cynical and thought-manipulated misguided.

 

If they believe that fish feel pain, they will believe that they suffer terrible human pain, and if they believe that, they are likely to support calls for a ban or (more likely) unwelcome restrictions on our sport to the point where it will become unlike the sport of fishing we know today.

 

That’s why it is important.

 

For my part, having looked at the complex issues involved over the many years, I’m convinced that to talk about fish feeling pain is ridiculous.

 

Being the person I am, if I thought that what I do is capable of causing pain or suffering, I’d quit, not live with it. And I don’t see me quitting

 

Tight Lines - leon

[Leon Roskilly]

p.s.

 

I think I'll go along with Bruno's closing sentence now

 

Tight Lines - leon

[phonebush]

Leon,

I know circumstances are different in the UK. I too will make this my last comment.

 

Pain is such a difficult word in the first place. If one is to narrow it to the sensation of any physical discomfort occurring as the result of injury then maybe fish feel pain.

 

If on the other hand pain is a state of discomfort that occurs as mental suffering caused by a physical stimuli then absoulty they cannot feel pain.

 

Fish have no verbs.

Phone