# Do fish feel pain?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [October 21, 2005, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233 "2005-10-21T09:03:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@johng](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johng)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/1 "2005-10-21T09:03:59Z")
As someone considering taking up angling after a long break, I have been pondering the question of whether it is a cruel sport. The long and the short of it is, do fish feel pain when they are caught? I believe there is conflicting opinion about this in the scientific community and I would welcome some informed comment from all you straight dopers out there.
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### Author:  [@Foldup\_Rabbit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Foldup_Rabbit)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/2 "2005-10-21T09:14:27Z")
Ah, a question of long debate. I’ve always felt that fish feel pain (just look at them wiggle!), and this gave me the opportunity to go check out the facts. Coincidentally, I’m also doing some critiques for school on research papers that explore pain in arthopods.
Anyway. Yes, fish feel pain. The latest study I could find was one instituted by the Roslin Institute in 2003. The researchers anaesthetised fish and then applied mechanical, thermal and chemical stimuli to their heads and tracked the resulting changes in the brain. They also left some fish free of anaesthesia to watch their physical and behavioural changes.
Fish managed to thrash in a manner similar to higher vertebrates, indicating the reaction was not a mere reflex. The researchers also observed marked behavioural changes in the fish they poked at versus the fish they left alone.
Also, goldfish remember more than you think.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/3 "2005-10-21T09:22:33Z")
To a certain extent, the question is impossible to answer, because it can always be argued that something is just responding in a way that _looks like_ they feel pain, but that it has no innner perception at all - this is a bit of an old-fashioned (and often religiously-derived) view of animals, but you will still find people espousing it.
It could even be (perhaps not very plausibly) argued that no _humans_ other than yourself feels pain, or has any inner life at all; the only mind to which you have direct access is your own. Of course, I think most people would accept that it’s quite reasonable to _infer_ that humans all feel and think in a broadly equivalent way.
Anyway, fish have a considerably less complex nervous system than we do, including a far less complex brain with which to _appreciate_ pain. What that means in terms of their _experience of the world_ is pretty much impossible to determine.
However, I’m sure it’s reasonable to say that, in whatever sense a fish actually _wants_, it certainly doesn’t _want_ to be hauled out of the water by a hook in its mouth and in whatever sense a fish actually _feels distress_, this experience is going to be among the most distressing.
OTOH, We’re omnivores, we’re near the top of the food chain and fish is tasty.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/4 "2005-10-21T09:25:33Z")
I worked in the aquarium business for, give or take, around ten years. In that time, I handled a lot of live fish, in my bare hands. I also euthanized quite a lot. There’s a kind of quivering stiffness that comes over a fish when one is visiting such atrocities on it that left me, at least, with the impression that fish do indeed feel pain. Anyone who’s ever cleaned a live fish for the table can tell you the same thing.
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### Author:  [@Ponster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponster)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/5 "2005-10-21T09:40:28Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> OTOH, We’re omnivores, we’re near the top of the food chain and fish is tasty.
Only _near_ the top ?
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### Author:  [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/6 "2005-10-21T09:52:10Z")
> [@lissener](#):
>
> I worked in the aquarium business for, give or take, around ten years. In that time, I handled a lot of live fish, in my bare hands. I also euthanized quite a lot. There’s a kind of quivering stiffness that comes over a fish when one is visiting such atrocities on it that left me, at least, with the impression that fish do indeed feel pain. Anyone who’s ever cleaned a live fish for the table can tell you the same thing.
“Cleaned a live fish for the table”? :eek:
I’ve no real qualms over angling, tho’ I don’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, including a lack of confidence in my ability to get the hook out without maiming the poor creature, but I do feel that the least we owe to any vertebrate food item is to kill it as quickly as possible. ☹
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/7 "2005-10-21T09:52:54Z")
> [@Ponster](#):
>
> Only _near_ the top ?
Individuals of our species sometimes get eaten by sharks, big cats, wolves, bears, reptiles…
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### Author:  [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/8 "2005-10-21T13:40:39Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Individuals of our species sometimes get eaten by sharks, big cats, wolves, bears, reptiles…
And they get killed by bacteria and virii, amongst other things. And some of those you mention have other predators which kill them. The top of the food chain is not really very well defined.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/9 "2005-10-21T14:01:43Z")
Sure; I only said ‘near’ because I hoped it would forestall such nitpicks.
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### Author:  [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/10 "2005-10-21T14:08:13Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> Sure; I only said ‘near’ because I hoped it would forestall such nitpicks.
I’m guessing that you yourself have no real qualms about your position on the food chain. 😃
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/11 "2005-10-21T14:11:51Z")
> [@Malacandra](#):
>
> I’m guessing that you yourself have no real qualms about your position on the food chain. 😃
Only part of it; lets just say I don’t have any qualms about those species that I place _below me_ in the chain; I have grave reservations about those species that would seek to place themselves above me.
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### Author:  [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/12 "2005-10-21T15:05:11Z")
To me, pain is not the issue. Almost all fish eat other living creatures. For them to be caught and eaten themselves is not unethical. It is part of the natural scheme of things. By the time an angler catches a fish, it has killed and eaten tens of thousands of smaller creatures. Nobody wags a finger (or fin) at the fish for its barbaric behavior.
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### Author:  [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/13 "2005-10-21T15:15:46Z")
> [@AskNott](#):
>
> To me, pain is not the issue. Almost all fish eat other living creatures. For them to be caught and eaten themselves is not unethical. It is part of the natural scheme of things. By the time an angler catches a fish, it has killed and eaten tens of thousands of smaller creatures. Nobody wags a finger (or fin) at the fish for its barbaric behavior.
No. But that is because it would be a ridiculous anthropomorphism of the fish. Upbraiding a fish for its cruel treatment of its food is nonsensical. Upbraiding a human is not.
(Don’t get me wrong. Fish=yummy is a more common mindset for me than fish=poor victim. And I’m quite aware that the haddock fillet I ate last night came from something that gasped out its life rather slowly.)
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### Author:  [@Happy\_Lendervedder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Lendervedder)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/14 "2005-10-21T15:28:18Z")
> [@Malacandra](#):
>
> “Cleaned a live fish for the table”? :eek:
>
> I’ve no real qualms over angling, tho’ I don’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, including a lack of confidence in my ability to get the hook out without maiming the poor creature, but I do feel that the least we owe to any vertebrate food item is to kill it as quickly as possible. ☹
Cafish are hard buggers to kill. I saw my uncles pound away with a mallet on this thing’s head once, assumed it was dead, and began skinning it, only to have it start thrashing around and gurgling. So they pounded on it some more, figured it to be dead, only to have it start thrashing again when they went to slice the skin off. I had to leave somewhere around the fourth round of this.
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### Author:  [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/15 "2005-10-21T15:37:04Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> Individuals of our species sometimes get eaten by sharks, big cats, wolves, bears, reptiles…
Does the [Nitro express](http://www.accuratereloading.com/700ne.html) count, or is our position in the food chain determined without technology?
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### Author:  [@SnakesCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SnakesCatLady)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/16 "2005-10-21T15:42:05Z")
Whether they feel pain or not I don’t claim to know, but if they do they don’t seem to learn from it. When I used to fish quite a bit at our cabin on Lake Harding in Alabama, I would often catch large catfish and carp that had hooks in their mouths where they had been caught before and snapped the line.
I don’t fish anymore because the lake is too polluted to eat the fish.
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### Author:  [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/17 "2005-10-21T16:08:26Z")
[I posted this in a previous thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=266379):
> [@Johnny L.A.](#):
>
> The March 2004 issue of Dive Training magazine has an article on page 85 called “Do Fish Feel Pain?” I looked, but could not find the article online. Obviously I can’t post the whole article here, but here are some highlights:
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > [Lynne Sneddon], a professor of animal biology at the University of Liverpool, in England, published a study in which she tried to provoke pain in fish. Not just an “owwie”, mind you, but actual “pain” – a sensation of equal parts physical discomfort and emotional suffering usually reserved for creatures with big brains.
>
> The professor injected a group of rainbow trout in the snout with bee venom, another group with acetic acid (the article noted the irony to fish’n’chips fans that acetic acid is the acid in malt vinegar), and a third group with saline as a control group. A fourth group was handled by researchers, but not injected. This was to rule out the stress of experimentation being the cause of any reaction.
>
> Sensors known as nociceptors are designed to warn the organism about “noxious stimulation” and are the “front line defense against impaling oneself on sharp objects”.
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > “Anomalous behaviours were exhibited by trout subjected to bee venom and acetic acid,” Sneddon says. "Fish demonstrated ‘rocking’ motion, stikingly similar to the kind of motion seen in stressed higher vertibrates like mammals… These do not appear to be reflex responses.
> >
> > That reaction fulfills a set of criteria for animal suffering, Sneddon says. To make sure, she gave fish morphine to see if they “feel better” after treatment. Sure enough, their respirations alowed and they stopped swaying. So that settles it. Fish feel pain.
>
> “Not so fast,” the article continues. James Rose of the University of Wyoming Department of psychology and Department of Zoology and Physiology says that “fish can’t possibly feel pain, even if they display a few suspicious-looking behaviours, because they don’t have the brains for it.”
>
> The article states that the medical definition of pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with tissue damage… The key is the emotional component.” That is, in order to feel pain, the brain needs the “wiring” to experience both sensation and emotion. “That’s the problem,” Rose says. “In fish, there’s not a snowball’s chance because they don’t have the hardware to have consciousness.”
>
> The article continues:
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > Sneddon uses a looser definition of pain that’s widely used in animal-based research. If the animal has basic neurological receptors, including nociceptors, connected to a central nervous system, the ability to naturally create painkillers called neuropeptide opiates, a proven reaction to analgesics, and humanlike reactions to pain, it’s a winner.
>
> Sneddon says that not all fish (e.g. sharks and rays – elasmobranchs) pass the test because they don’t have nociceptors.
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > But just because it looks like pain, doesn’t mean it really is pain, Rose says. And he’s got a pretty good argument, grounded in the fundamental rule of neurobiology: If the apparatus isn’t there – which it’s not in fish – the sensation isn’t either.
>
> There are two columns of “interpretations”.
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > Ultimately, “if it looks like pain, it is pain” isn’t a good definition [Snow, whose credentials I didn’t see in my scan of the article, as I’m running out of time] says, "Humans born without cerebral hemispheres will still show facial signs of “pain” when exposed to noxious stimuli, even though they are permanently unconscious. Likewise, people with spinal cord injuries may reflexively pull away from a pin prick, even though they can’t feel it. Both are nociceptor reactions.
>
> So it appears that while fish demonstrate behaviours that we would call reaction to pain, it’s not at all clear that they actually feel “pain”. I don’t know if lobsters have nociceptors, but I’m guessing (and it’s only a guess) that they don’t. In any case, they don’t have the apparatus to feel “pain” on a level discussed in the article.
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### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/18 "2005-10-21T17:15:28Z")
> [@Johnny L.A.](#):
>
> [I posted this in a previous thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=266379):
>
> \
> But just because it looks like pain, doesn’t mean it really is pain, Rose says. And he’s got a pretty good argument, grounded in the fundamental rule of neurobiology: If the apparatus isn’t there – which it’s not in fish – the sensation isn’t either.
> \
I am **deeply** skeptical of attempts to scientifially prove a given animal can’t feel pain.
For starters, [lack of (currently understood) structures does NOT always mean lack of function](http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm). There are many cases where someone has invoked science to assert that something cannot be, and later been shown wrong.
For one thing, it strikes me as sloppy science. Very roughly speaking, in science, something is observed, and inferences are drawn, and tests are conducted. In this case a painlike reaction is observed, inferences are drawn (either “it’s probably the same thing I feel, as I evolved similarly from a common ancestor, and therefore it’s pain”, or else "it can’t be pain, even though I evolved similarly from a common ancestor, and the reactions seem the same, because \); finally, tests are performed in which the reaction does indeed mimic pain. Conclusion drawn: It can’t be true pain.
Huh?
The observed facts are consonant with pain as we observe it in ourselves and other animals. Whether or not some grant-holder can find a structure he or she thinks is responsible seems of little interest – we started the experiment knowing WE PERSONALLY feel pain, and the observed reactions to both stimulus and morphine mimic pain. It would seem the burden of proof would lie on those denying that these observations constitute pain.
Secondly, as I hinted at above with my evolution comment, there’s a thing even scientists fall prey to, which I think of as the “Ptolemaic fallacy”. The [Ptolemaic System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_system) taught that earth was the center of the universe. Ever since, we’ve been learning that things that we thought were unique about us are not so unique. It’s been a long and humbling porocess. When I see someone assert that we have an ability that animals do not, I wonder whether we’ll one day lose that illusion about our uniqueness as well.
Thirdly, there’s almost always conflict of interest in humans trying to show whether animals feel or sense this or that. Often they are trying to make themselves feel better about something they do to others. Either they are vegetarians who start out already feeling guilty, or non-vegetarians who might feel guilt even without being aware of it. It’s like letting the fox watch the hen house to ask these people whether a given animal feels pain; I always wonder about their objectivity.
It reminds me of the arguments that “lesser” humans who “lack the structure” for “higher functions” can be held as slaves. Self-justifying and utterly false, a lot of “science” has been used to support racial, economic, and eugenic arguements. All those “scientists” were just as confident in their assertions as these students of the fish pain question.
Lastly, when they assert things like “In fish, there’s not a snowball’s chance because they don’t have the hardware to have consciousness,” I wonder who is fooling whom. What “consciousness” even is is at best poorly understood, let alone the biological “hardware” associated with it – see my link about hydrocephaly above for a documented case of someone performing at a high level without “hardware”. It’s the height of unscientific fantasy for this guy to get inside the awareness of a fish and declare what the fish experiences, just because he didn’t find a physical structure he recognizes.
At one time, learned persons were sure the brain had nothing to do with thought. This guy is still learning about the universe like the rest of us; it might be too early to be making absolute statements.
Sailboat
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### Author:  [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/19 "2005-10-21T17:23:40Z")
You’re only tackling half of the argument though. As quoted, other scientists hold the same view as you. From my (remembered) reading of the article over a year ago, the conclusion was that fish either feel ‘pain’ as we understand it or they don’t.
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### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2005, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-fish-feel-pain/327233/20 "2005-10-21T19:03:25Z")
> [@Malacandra](#):
>
> I do feel that the least we owe to any vertebrate food item is to kill it as quickly as possible. ☹
Then whatever you do, do **not** watch _Iron Chef_. The things they do to live seafood on that show are sometimes horrifying.
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