Do Fish Feel Pain?
If you were ask People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), you would get a vehement YES!.
However, Bill Smoker, professor of fisheries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks claims that the scientific community seems to think otherwise.
“Fish lack the higher level brain structures and are not able to be conscious of something like pain,” said Smoker. “I truly don’t think that fish experience what we experience.”
Whether animals face pain the same way that people do, is a hotly debated issue, which is largely due to something called nociception.
Nociception is the nervous system’s detection of harmful stimuli, such as what you would feel if you held your hand too close to an open flame. But a 2004 report by the American Fisheries Society, American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, “Guidelines for the Use of Fishes in Research,” says that while this can lead to the experience of pain, it is not the same as pain.
Pain is a psychological experience that requires consciousness, while mere nociception is simply the body’s way of detecting physiological stress. According to the report, fish possess nociception and experience physiological stress, but don’t have the consciousness required to feel pain.
As evidence the guidelines cite modern methods of imaging human brains. When humans feel pain, the same part of the brain — the cortical regional of the frontal and parietal lobes — is always activated. It’s a part of the brain that fish don’t have.
Thus, in the end, according to the scientific community, while fish experience physiological stress, it is not the same as pain as we know it.
The underlying assumption is that our definition of pain is based on our experience of it. In the end, fish react the same as we would – stress which can be fatal.
Must reads:
Treating Cotton Mouth Disease
What Is Ich, And How To Keep Your Aquarium Ich Free
