Do Fish Feel Pain?

Read Do Fish Feel Pain? by Victoria Braithwaite for the latest science. To a child, it is obvious fish indeed feel pain. They writhe when poked, same as people. Science now concurs.

Even a genius like René Descartes got it wrong. Even though he knew full-well that fish and humans had almost identical nervous systems, he ignored that evidence and swallowed an ancient Catholic superstition, that people have invisible, undetectable souls but all animals including fish do not. Therefore men are conscious and fish are not. Therefore people feel pain but fish do not.

According to Catholicism, fish are like robots that just pretend to feel pain. His Catholic mother drummed into him the Catholic doctrine that animals have no rights of any kind. God created them for the sole purpose of pleasing humans. They can not actually feel pain no matter how it looks. This rationalisation allowed people of the time to indulge extreme brutality toward all animals with a clear conscience.

Anyone who has kept tropical fish, like myself, is frustrated by the aggressive ignorance of people who enjoy finding inventive ways to make fish miserable, but never stop for a second to study them. They remind me of the ignorance and denial of slave owners.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)