Customer Reviews

Do Fish Feel Pain?

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Refreshingly intelligent book, which trusts the reader and maintains a thoughtful and balanced tone throughout. The author explores the issues around fish pain, suffering and welfare, identifying the questions we might ask, the ways we might try to answer them, and what the answers really mean. At each stage the book gives clear but detailed descriptions of the scientific research supporting each conclusion, making the story accessible to non-specialists and crucially moving the text from a 'trust me, I know' harangue to a 'here's what we know' dialogue.
Considering the general philosophical issues around animal welfare as well as the scientific questions of what fish can experience, the book scrupulously fails to find a bogeyman or call for any knee-jerk instant solutions. Nonetheless, it raises some hard issues, and in a world where we're ready to pay more for free-range poultry, it may be timely to be hearing some unpalatable facts about many of the standard commercial fishing practices used to produce the fish on our plates.
Alongside the exploration of the book's main themes comes plenty of fascinating biology, including the extraordinary and rather delightful story of the grouper and the eel, which I've had to repeat to everyone since reading it. The author is a fish biologist, and the book tells a perhaps unintended third story, that of the scientific process, the honest search for the right question, and then the ingenuity and elegance applied to finding an answer. When the predominant exposure to science is about dramatic breakthroughs or headline-grabbing controversy, this readable, thoughtful and informative book is a tribute to the people quietly getting on with it, trying to find out how things really work. I'm grateful one of them has found the time to share the process, as well as raising some very important issues about our understanding of and interactions with these fascinating and diverse animals.
Comment

I approached this book with from a rather skeptical perspective, but found myself won over by the strength of the author's argument. It would be easy to slip into simple advocacy - either for anglers or for animal rights - but Braithwaite artfully avoids this trap. Instead, she allows the data to speak for themselves, and takes the reader through the series of well-designed experimental steps that are necessary to defend her contention that fish do indeed feel pain. Whether or not you agree with her conclusions is another matter, but as a biologist I found the data compelling

This is science at its best - clear, methodical, and rational. I'd recommend it highly to students, not just as a study in fish biology, but also as an example of how to present an emotive argument without letting emotion cloud the issue.

My brother is a keen angler. We've argued in the past about whether fish feel pain. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt. However, I don't need to doubt any longer - the proof is in this book that fish can suffer. Boy, am I going to feel smug when I lend him my copy!

Professor Braithwaite is an expert in this field. She, and fellow researchers, began by asking whether fish have the necessary receptors and nerve fibres to detect painful events. Next they wanted to determine whether a potentially painful stimulus triggered activity in the nervous system. If they were able to find positive answers to those two questions, the final test was to find out how the experience of a potentially painful event affected the behaviour of fish and the decisions that they made. The upshot is that Braithwaite did find the pain receptors and fish responded to the pain felt. This is backed up a lot of recent research, some of with is quoted in the book.

Dr. Braithwaites answers to the above questions are "yes" and "yes." Fish have the capacity to experience pain, think about it, and react to it emotionally. Their brains are similar to those of mammals and other vertebrates, so why would anyone think that they are fundamentally different than birds, dogs and monkeys? Well, first of all they look very different. Fish don't have arms and legs; they have annoyingly stoic faces, and make no vocalizations. They are fished with hooks, fish farmed, and placed in small bowls and displayed like decorations. Up to the end of the 1900's almost no research had been done on fish sentience, although "IQ testing" has been going on for decades -- often with surprising results.

Braithwaite points out that scientists were well-meaning by reducing the number of rodents used in experiments and replacing them with zebra fish. But is this really better? Braithwaite believes that scientists and the fishing industry need to wake up to welfare issues pertaining to fish. I wholeheartedly agree, but there is one point of annoyance with her attitude. She seems to think everything is A-OK with the lab work done on non-fish animals, and with the factory farming of mammals and fowl. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she writes from a European perspective. Europe generally gets higher marks in animal welfare than the United States and many other countries. This is evidenced by her repeated citing of Britain's 1986 Animal Scientific Procedures Act. One statement in particular was disturbing to me: "We wouldn't accept killing chickens by throwing them into a tank of water and waiting for them to drown, so why don't we object to fish suffocating on trawler decks?" (page 18)

Dr. Braithwaite, we do unfortunately accept practices that are just as evil or more so. In chicken factory farms, when the chickens survive the slaughter phase of the assembly line, they are dunked alive and conscious into scalding hot water intended for feather removal. Braithwaite is well-meaning and her work is important and timely, but if she thinks welfare issues surrounding factory farm and laboratory animals have been resolved, then she has been drinking too much from The Fountain of Temple Grandin. She suffers from her own delusions if this is what she thinks.

I don't mean to slam this book at all. It really is an amazing piece of academic literature for a general readership. She explains in detail (enough for any non-scientist) how she discovered pain reception and stress-reaction in fish. I refuse to summarize, however. You need to read it yourself to really appreciate how carefully they thought through the experiments to eliminate alternative explanations. She also describes very carefully the intelligence testing on fish and field observations that corroborate these experiments. Some of the reviewers have tried to slight the book by making Braithwaite's arguments seem simplistic or superficial, but this is not the case. Read for yourself.

It is not whether fish can feel pain or not, all creatures want to stay alive just like all humans. The struggle of a fish when taken out of water is no different from a person forced into water to be drowned.

Victoria Braithwaite asks, quite simply, "Do fish feel pain?" She writes, "Pain is a negative, unpleasant sensation that we try to avoid. It also makes most of us uncomfortable to know that someone else is hurting" (p. 3). And I would argue that many people also feel uncomfortable knowing that animals are hurting. Does this include fish?

She begins by exploring whether fish have the receptors for detecting painful stimuli. Then she discusses whether fish change their behavior upon receiving a painful stimulus, and whether that behavioral change reverts to the pre-pain state when pain-masking drugs are administered. Finally, she points out that experiments show that fish have a memory of pain, and this memory will change their future behavior.

She writes, "This book examines the evidence we currently have for whether fish can suffer, and indeed whether it is meaningful to discuss pain in fish" (p. 23). "To answer the question raised by the title of this book, we need to show that fish have the apparatus to detect noxious stimuli - the nociceptors and fibres that conduct the information - but we also need to ask whether fish are capable of perception and awareness" (p. 41).

The answer is, yes.

The question now is, what do we do with this knowledge?

"Accepting that an animal has the ability to suffer from pain changes the way we choose to interact, handle, and care for it" (p.2).

"Many scientists complain about the lengthy [IACUC] process, but the regulations are important - the training and the writing of the project proposal force researchers to contemplate the real value of the animal work being proposed" (p. 6).

"Animal welfare concerns more than just health and well being; it expresses ideas about the quality of an animal's life and maintains the moral view that animals that are sentient should be protected from unnecessary pain and distress" (p. 16).

People utilize fish in many ways, as pets, as food, and as research animals. However, it is recreational angling and commercial fishing and aquaculture that impacts most fish. The author writes, "What we learn from these studies can be implemented into codes of practice to guide anglers about what is and isn't good for the fish" (p. 164). "Perhaps the biggest negative effect we have on fish, and the least researched, is how we fish at sea" (p. 174).

Apologists tell us that fish are caught again and again in "catch and release" fisheries, so it sure doesn't seem like fish are suffering. And commercial fishers just tell us that they are utilizing techniques dictated by custom and economics.

Yet, isn't this the same argument used 100 years ago regarding livestock and slaughter? Doesn't the National Rifle Association now promote the highest ethics when hunting? People and customs change.

The deaths of fish can be improved. That is the responsibility of those who utilize fish. And the ethical consumer must begin to ask the appropriate questions and vote with their dollars when it comes to sustainable seafood, as well as well-treated fish.

Time to begin the process, and continue the conversation.

The first time I had to yank a hook out of a baby fish, my heart trebled. When I searched on the internet on whether fish feel pain, I found very little information.

So this book should get stars simply by being the first to devote an entire book to the topic. A very important topic I believe.

It is a thin book, obviously, but that's hardly the author's fault, as there really is relatively little research done on the topic.

It is an overall well written book. I felt the first couple of chapters of introductory to the main theme sometimes is a little slow, occasionally saying the things most people already know. But once the book started to talk about the author's own scientific experiments investigating whether fish feel pain, it became very interesting. Maybe because I'm not a biologist, so there is a lot of curiosity in me to see how this is done. I'm glad all is described in detail and in a way a lay person can understand. I found her experiments fascinating and it would be a great read for any high school or even middle school kids pondering a career in science.

The following chapters when the author argued in different aspects why fish do feel pain are very convincing and equally fascinating.

The end of the book talked about fish welfare, which is very good. I had not been aware of the inhumane practices in the fishing industry.

It's good the author is not taking a stand on angling. She is quite philosophical about it. I do wish she give more instructions on how to treat fish more humanely when you do enjoy angling, such as what's the fastest and least painful way to kill a fish once you get it.

The book is definitely worth reading, even just for the juicy animal behavior examples, like how two different marine species cooperate to hunt.

I do hope in a few years the author can update the book with new discoveries and new development, and make it a even more authoritative volume on the subject.

Memory? Cortisol? Just because a fish can get back to where it should to spawn each year is not evidence of a developed memory or brain. In mammalian species with animals that have much larger and more developed brains than fish, science has yet to determine why animals are able to get back to certain spots. And cortisol? You dont have to be in pain to have cortisol course through your veins. Excitement of many types will cause this. She can claim not to be anti-fishing, but dont let her fool you, her book with her shoddy science are all about 'feeling good' and stopping the bad 'ol fishermen.

Does it hurt humans to cut their finger nails? If one hooks a fish in the tongue, the fish come in very easily to the fisherman. Hook them in the corner of their mouth and they will fight until they have no fight left. Case closed. No need to waste anymore time and money on future studies.