Fish, Pain, and Memory-The Controversy

i just don't see what good it does as hobbyists to believe that fish don't feel pain. pretty much anything that would cause pain is also going to cause some form of physical damage. if you are doing something to a fish and you have to justify your actions by saying,'oh, it's okay, fish can't feel pain' then you should stop what you're doing.
 
I'll add my 2 cents. The controversy about fish and pain deals with the difference between the physical reaction and the ability to be aware of this reaction. It is fairly obvious that fish have a physiological reaction to "painful" stimuli, but it is not as obvious if they are cognitively aware of this physiological reaction.
 
so when you stub your toe, you may curse (I personally try not to), and throw something, but when a fish gets his tail nipped, he may simply move out of the way...
 
Fish may not feel pain as we experience it but I think it's obvious that what could cause pain and suffering to us is, at the very least, causing stress to the fish. I think we all know that enough stress can diminish the quality of life for the animal and at worst end it's life.

Q
 
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if thats not memory i dont know what is.... training a fish to hope out the water for food...... its like shamu
 
That is so cute!

The linked thread from the royal society shows that it does not appear to simply be a pavlovian reaction.

I think your point on stress, though, is really important, I mean, even if you don't believe fish feel pain. If it was simply a pavlovian reaction, I don't think they could die of stress, unless they became physically exhausted to the point of death. Which almost all death from stress is not.
 
My thoughts on this argument have always been that we are trying to establish the creatures relationship to time.

The avoidance of negative stimulus (roughly corollary to pain) is pretty universal, a case could be made that it is observed in bacteria and yeast (e.g. bacterial encysting) so I think that they feel "pain" in this sense is fairly clear.

What I think we mean is, do they experience pain with all of the emotional baggage that attends our own experience. For instance are they anxious, depressed, afraid, or possibly feel helpless with the expectation, experience or memory of pain as we are. How long do these feelings/reactions persist?

I think that they are less aware of longer timescales than we are and do primarily live in the moment (10min or less, my opinion based on personal non-scientific observations). That is not to say that they don't attach significance to strongly negative (the net) or positive (food) stimuli but I think its more akin to our "knee-jerk" reactions (staying in their territory just feels right etc). The entire panoply of piscine reactions would fall into what we might inelegantly class as unconscious with greater complexity on very short timescales. Each kind of fish of course exhibits variation.

I guess I'm trying to say is, you know how you get up at 5 in the morning and the first thing you are consciously aware of is turning on the radio in the car at 6:30 already stressed out and having showered, shaved, etc., eaten, and said goodbye to family on autopilot. They live in that "autopilot experience".
 
The problem to me is that saying it is a knee-jerk reaction is almost metaphysical, from my knowledge at least. We have scanned the brain and seen the effects of different thoughts, emotions, etc, but there is no way to prove that humans themselves feel emotion besides the fact that we are human. The frontal cortex may light up, but the actual release of say, dopamine, takes place in the thalmus. Also, cephalopod brains work differently than ours do, but those are some intelligent animals, because the structures used compensate for what is used in mammals (larger tubes instead of insulation). The study on trout also suggested otherwise. Man, I'm still burnt on researching or I would look up some more papers going either direction. I also am just working off of rudimentary neuroscience here.
 
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