Fishes have the same emotional response to pain as mammals. Farmed fishes experience the same suffering as farmed land animals. Living in contaminated water and constant stress.
THEA PEDROZA: Fish are in many ways as intelligent as land animals, but this was not widely understood in the scientific community until recently. This is important to understanding and reducing the suffering fish experience in two ways. First, intelligent animals learn from harmful situations, which cause them to experience stress and fear in the future. Second, public awareness of fish intelligence helps build empathy — and therefore support — for fish welfare improvements…
The authors discuss and summarize the evidence for pain in fishes compared to other animals. While fishes and humans both have a reflexive response to avoid pain, our emotional response enables us to learn from that experience in order to avoid it in the future. Fishes have all the signs of emotional response to pain that mammals do. For example, research shows that fishes make tradeoffs between the risk of pain and motivators like food and companionship.
What does this mean for the treatment of fishes in commercial fishing and aquaculture? The scale of these operations is enormous — trillions of fishes are caught every year. Overfishing has caused declining populations and declining catches for wild fishes. Today, more than half of fishes used for food come from aquaculture…
Farmed fishes suffer from the negative impacts of overcrowding and poor conditions. They cannot find shelter, escape aggressive fishes, or express their natural behaviors. They live in contaminated water, and are frequently handled, which causes stress and injury. Farmed fishes experience the same suffering during slaughter as wild fish — they die of asphyxiation, gill cutting, or gutting. SOURCE…
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