Reeling in pain
By Dr. Manny Bernstein
Thanks for Fred LeBrun’s article calling
attention to the concern over fish feeling pain. Animal as well
as human pain has been a lifelong interest and concern of mine as
well.
There’s an Adirondack saying: “Give
a man a fish, and he’ll have one meal. Teach him to fish,
and he’ll sit in a boat all day and drink beer.” Well,
I’ve learned to love sitting in a boat all day.
In fact, my godfather, Sean Carrillo, and goddaughter, Bibbie, can’t
wait to come up here and fish with me. We fish with magnets. Last
season, we caught a steel ladder and a pot pipe in Upper Saranac
Lake.
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Do fish have
the brains to feel pain? |
Photo courtesy of the
Adirondack Museum |
I loved to fish more than anything as a kid, and I still would be
an avid angler if I knew fish felt no pain. I stopped fishing after
I began to sense that the fish I caught were suffering. In 1950
I approached the veterinarians at University of Pennsylvania to
ask how much animals felt pain. At the time, those experts thought
vertebrates (which include many species of fish) feel more pain
than invertebrates, but they thought fish feel less pain than mammals
do.
Much later, in the 1990s, while editor of an animal research journal,
I became more certain that fish feel pain as I read manuscripts
by scientists describing how we can determine how non-human mammals
are experiencing pain.
The recent research referred to by Fred has found that trout have
58 receptors on the face and head, and 22 could be classified as
nociceptors, which transmit pain. They also found that fish responded
to noxious stimuli in ways similar to mammals, including behavioral
changes that showed their reactions were not simply reflex responses.
Even the United Kingdom Angling Society described the findings as
“surprising.”
Bruno Broughton, the fish biologist who advises the National Angler’s
Alliance, said: “I doubt whether it will come as much of a
shock to anglers to learn that fish have an elaborate system of
sensory cells around their mouth. However, it is an entirely different
matter to draw conclusions about the ability of fish to feel pain,
a psychological experience for which they literally do not have
the brains.”
Yet other fish biologists declared in The Journal of Fish and Fisheries:
“Gone (or at least obsolete) is the image of fish as drudging
and dimwitted pea brains driven largely by ‘instinct.’”
Dr. Michael Fox, veterinarian, psychologist and author of dozens
of books and articles about animal behavior, says the following:
“There is no question that fish feel pain. Behavioral scientists
have determined that fish are highly intelligent and evolved beings.
They use tools, cooperate with each other in hunting as well as
protecting each other and socializing. They have special chums they
choose to be with, and have social systems. Their physiological
makeup is so similar to ours that they actually have natural opiate
systems and benzodiazepine, complete with receptors which, like
ours, work to mediate their pain.”
Some fish were observed to engage in commerce by cleaning the teeth
of other, much larger fish—not too clean, so that the “client”
would need more frequent cleanings. In return they had nourishment
from what they had cleaned.
After reading Fred’s article, Dr. Fox wrote to me: “Fish
probably experience more fear—a survival mechanism—than
physical pain, especially when caught and their freedom restrained
by a hook or a net. Fish fear is as much an ethical issue as fish
pain. Fish pull on the hook to try to be free from the line because
their fear and will to live are more than the pain they feel.”
Fish gourmets can taste the difference in the flesh of fish caught
and killed swiftly and those who have struggled at length to survive
and to be free.
Please heed Dr. Fox’s suggestions for alleviating the suffering
of fish: Do not use set-ups with multiple hooks. If you kill the
fish, do it as quickly as possible. Never use a “stringer,”
which pulls fish behind a boat with strings that go through the
gills (this is particularly painful, slowly suffocating a fish).
You’ll feel better if you do these things, and so will the
fish.
Dr. Manny Bernstein calls himself the oldest
shrink still living in the Adirondacks.
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