The question of whether fish feel pain was first asked by the philosopher Rene Descartes back in the seventeenth century. His opinion was that they did not. The reason he gave for this was that he said all animals are not conscious and therefore, could not feel pain. Since then, there have been and still are research projects looking at the same question. And the general consensus is that they do feel pain.
One of the main reasons for this was through the work of Dr Lynne Sneddon, the Director of Bio-veterinary Science at Liverpool University. In 2002, she discovered that fish possess nociceptors in the mouth. Nociceptors are present in humans and their function is to transmit pain signals to the brain. Considering that people who catch fish do so when the fish bites down on the hook of the fishing rod. When the fish is reeled in, the hook has to be removed from the mouth.
So, at first sight, this appears to be a possible act of cruelty. However, it is not as simple as that. When we feel pain, our nociceptors send the pain signal to the neocortex part of the brain. This is a highly developed section of the brain and it is argued that because fish do not have a neocortex, then they cannot process and therefore “feel” the pain.
This question, therefore, remains an open one. However, most scientists who research this subject, believe that the evidence is that fish do feel pain but it may be experienced in a different way to how we experience it. For example, fish do not feel the cold like us, but they are more sensitive to changes in pressure.
Dr Sneddon has reviewed many of the research programmes undertaken into this question. The result of all of this was that we should consider that fish do feel pain as some sort of sensation. Therefore, she says, that more care should be taken in the future when dealing with the welfare and animal husbandry of fish. Whether in the future, this will result in new practices and legislation on how we treat fish, remains to be seen.
John Pullen 