Yup. But deep down we all kinda knew that, right? It was always fish torture for sport.
Now I'm wondering where noodling is on this scale.
What is noodling?
I'm pretty sure a lot of people legitimately do not see fish as more than objects, and I mean they never fully made the connection not that they do it intentionally.
It never made sense to me that “fish don’t feel pain”. Like, even as a kid I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t. Who would be okay with a metal hook through their mouth? Even if they didn’t feel the same kind of pain we do (I’m sure they do), there’s got to be some part of their body screaming that things aren’t okay. Add on top of that the sudden inability to breathe and it really is just torture.
I like the idea of fishing (like relaxing on a boat with a goal) but I couldn’t do it
You could go out with the boat and try to snap some photos of fish, maybe feed them. That sounds relaxing as well.
Not really deep down, but yes
This article in particular is talking about when leaving fish in open air or ice water for the purpose of slaughter. Obviously that would hurt until the fish dies.
And how do you know that?
Hah, I guess my sarcasm got missed on this comment! The premise that fish can't feel pain because we don't know for a certainty that they can is blatantly just mental gymnastics to justify the continued practice of a cruel hobby.
Back when I used to fish a lot, they were out of the water for 30 seconds tops, and I caught the same fish multiple times within 15 minutes on several occasions. They really don't seem to be bothered by it.
Most of them die after that.
The stats on fish survival after being caught and released is actually pretty sad. If I remember correctly there was a lengthy study that showed a survival rate of only like 40%.
Was this the fish passing after a few minutes, hours, days? If you remember at all. Was there any controlling for gill damage during the catch? I know some idiots who will hold them up by the gills for pictures, I wonder if that causes damage? Or just dying from shock? I wonder if I can find the study
Where is fishing banned?
Not in this article, or anywhere else is it currently known what a fish feels in relation to how humans feel pain. Including asphyxiation or hooks. We don't currently have the capabilities to know how a fish interprets that stuff.
Well, IMO that's actually pretty easy to determine. I assume the pain you feel being cut by a hook is simmiliar to pain I feel being cut because we react the same way. Basically every living thing reacts the same way to cuts, yelping, bleeding then flight/fight. Cats, dogs, animals of all sorts go through the same steps when they are cut so it's a safe assumption their pain is simmiliar. And things that don't react, such as cutting a techincally alive potato, aren't really feeling pain. Idk maybe potatoes silently scream, can't disprove it, but that's just not the same as creature that flee from threats
So while we don't know what a fish thinks about suffocating in air, it's a reasonable assumption that it's similar to humans suffocating in water, unpleasant. We both thrash around and do our best to breathe again. Sure, in a philosophical sense it's imposible to know what other creatures think, even other humans that can verbally communicate, but that ignores some of the more obvious context clues.
Highlights from the Wikipedia article on Pain in fish
The central nervous system (CNS) of fish contains a spinal cord, medulla oblongata, and the brain, divided into telencephalon, diencephalon, mesencephalon and cerebellum.
Studies show that fish exhibit protective behavioural responses to putatively painful stimuli. When acetic acid or bee venom is injected into the lips of rainbow trout, they exhibit an anomalous side-to-side rocking behaviour on their pectoral fins, rub their lips along the sides and floors of the tanks and increase their ventilation rate. When acetic acid is injected into the lips of zebrafish, they respond by decreasing their activity. The magnitude of this behavioural response depends on the concentration of the acetic acid.
Early experiments provided evidence that fish learn to respond to putatively noxious stimuli. For instance, toadfish (Batrachoididae) grunt when they are electrically shocked, but after repeated shocks, they grunt simply at the sight of the electrode
In a 2007 study, goldfish were trained to feed at a location of the aquarium where subsequently they would receive an electric shock. The number of feeding attempts and time spent in the feeding/shock zone decreased with increased shock intensity and with increased food deprivation the number and the duration of feeding attempts increased as did escape responses as this zone was entered. The researchers suggested that goldfish make a trade-off in their motivation to feed with their motivation to avoid an acute noxious stimulus.
We could go philosophy 101 and wonder if you see the same color blue as I do, maybe yours is red? It is easy to say that's immposible to know, but that ignores everything science understands about visible light spectrums, cone recpetiors in the retina and the genetic markers that lead to color blindness.
Fish have nerve endings, they have brains that can process stimuli and their reactions to human standard "painful" stimuli is identical to our own. What reason is there to even doubt they feel pain simmiliar to our own?
Why wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that fish interpret pain as painful? They have a nervous system, inflicting pain on them will trigger a response in the nervous system, this response is most likely similar to the response in humans, that is the pain response is to avoid/remove whatever is causing the pain.
I remember there was a study done on how to best slaughter swine (pigs).
The methods that were investigated included: a mechanical hit on the head, suffocation in CO2, and some other measures.
What was found was not only that the suffocation method caused significant stress in the animals, but also that the meat collected this way tasted way worse than meat collected through other slaughtering methods.
this could be relevant in this case: if fish suffocate slowly to death, meat producers might have a financial incentive to change that, to be able to sell better-quality meat, possibly at a higher price. anyways, it would make for good advertisement. that is why meat-producers (fish-producers) should take this seriously.
And the reason we still use CO2 slaughter instead of something like Nitrogen is because.... They already have machines built for CO2 and just don't want to pay the cost of changing practices.
Pure greed and laziness.
Also co2 is easier because you can fill a pit with it, nitrogen will just float about and disperse.
As far as I’m aware NO2 will fill a pit. In the industry I work in NO2 leaks are serious threat because the engines that are worked on are in, what is essentially, a cage that you walk down into. I’ve not experienced it myself but heard from someone who experienced it firsthand as you just start feeling sleepy. I know now that it’s because our bodies are sensitive to asphyxiation from CO2 but not NO2, so as it displaces the oxygen in our lungs you just start getting woozy and tired.
All that being said; I am not an expert. Half this is information from diesel mechanics who work with it and the other half is from random science videos. So take it with a grain of salt.
It tends to be heavier than air, it will therefore accumulate in low places.
Most slaughter houses use bolt guns.
It's hard to find official statistics, but most definitely not.
It is clear, however, that in the United States today, “CO2 stunning of pigs is the major method that is used in large slaughter plants.” According to unpublished data from the Pig Improvement Company, the use of CO2 gas to stun pigs has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1999, CO2 was used to stun 2 percent of all pigs and 2.2 percent of pigs in establishments that slaughtered more than 4,500 pigs per day. By 2020, those numbers had risen to 86.2 percent and 96.2 percent, respectively. Today, according to FSIS enforcement records, at least 32 slaughter plants use CO2 gas slaughter systems.
Zero pain, or as minimal amount of pain as possible. Like, microseconds.
If you assume, that the operator doesn't make any mistakes and is always 100% on point. Which they are not, as has been documented by countless of hidden cameras people have put up in slaughterhouses.
And even then, you are ignoring the immense pain and stress the animals experience the rest of their life before getting killed.
They just know people will buy the meat no matter how much the animals were abused so why would they bother? Even those who see themselves as animal lovers happily look the other way with every purchase. The industry has all the incentives to be exceptionally cruel so of course it is.
I never understood the CO2 suffocation idea.. I mean, I don't k ow about fish, but mammals supposedly have a good detection for CO2 in their blood and it'll set off panic alarms everywhere.
Ignoring the vegetarian discussion for a minute, if they could at least use a different gas, say nitrogen or something, it should be a lot less stressful for the animals
"Are you insane? This gas costs a twelfth of a cent more! There's no way we could implement this."
All food is cruel. You can, at most, minimize the cruelty.
But you should know that millions of insects are killed in agriculture. Insects are indeed animals.
You can, if you want, minimize the amount of animals your presence in this world brings to an early death. But you cannot reduce it to zero no even near zero. Probably hundreds of small animals (most insects but surely many other small animals) die each day because things you do.
The line on how much do you want to minimize might be on one place for you, and that's ok. But you have to respect other people lines as well.
If that were true, we wouldn't be able to digest them. Ever tried eating a tree? Or a boulder? Those aren't food for humans. I'm not gonna argue against moral motivations for veganism, but I will argue against factually incorrect ones.
Yes they are. They have been for eons. It's not all they are and people should work towards meatless options and ethical meat like lab grown. But animals are definitely a food source.
Yes. It's crazy. That's why the vast majority of us don't do it.
It's one thing to be a vegetarian for health or environmental reasons.
When you try to convince people that meat==murder, you come across as a wackadoodle.
Stress is a hell of a drug
The article does a shitty job of linking to the paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04272-1
It makes a pretty good case that fish experience a lot of pain immediately after being taken out of the water.
I don't think this will do much to impact commercial fishing, it seems like it's targeted at the slaughter stages of fish farms
Otherwise, we’re going to fish the oceans until they’re dry and we will create hellish suffering for every life form involved until there’s nothing left to feel pain.
take comfort friend. our atmosphere will be unbreathable and we'll cook in our own juices long, long, long before the oceans dry up. It's becoming, every day, ever more unlikely that we'll wake up to the obvious dilema and be able to save ourselves. And there are some who profit from continuing down the path of stupidity, and our society is following them.
so take comfort. your premise is 100% on target, but the timeline is probably a lot shorter.
Yeah if people don't care about the equivalence of caging for meats then fish enduring pain is useless.
so those fish that jump out of the water at times experience pain the moment they leave the water? what time range are we talking? the are fish literally crossing land to get to other waters.
Without water, the delicate gill structures that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide stick together, causing CO2 from respiration to accumulate. These rising levels trigger nociception – the body's alarm system – which causes the fish to gasp. Eventually the elevated CO2 levels acidify the animal's blood and cerebrospinal fluid, ultimately resulting in unconsciousness.
Holy shit. That's horrific.
This is why net fishing is so problematic (apart from obvious environmental conserns and bycatch).
Stun your fish people. Don’t let their blood clot and lungs collapse while still conscious for multiple minutes. It’s cruel.
Let their lungs collapse?...
Yes. The g folds in front and everything shortens.
That's why we call them gls.
You can also spike the brain of the fish. There's stuff online about Ikejime which is supposed to be a way to quickly kill the fish to improve the quality of the meat. There's resources online about it.
So what you're saying is that Kurt Cobain was wrong and it's actually not OK to eat fish because they do, in fact, have feelings?
Ya, probably.
How about a new sport... Catch the fish under water and slap him a little, but not too hard?
Or how about just riding your rubber boat to where the fish are, then dropping a speaker and shouting "fuck you fish!" Threw the speaker? You could even hurt them intellectually!
Where did they throw the speaker?
I believe this is why Japanese fishermen will sometimes use the ikijime method where you kill the fish fast. I believe it also improves the quality of the meat too.
Ikizukuri (生き作り), also known as ikezukuri (活け造り), (roughly translated as "prepared alive"[1]) is the preparing of sashimi (raw fish) from live seafood. In this Japanese culinary technique, the most popular sea animal used is fish, but octopus, shrimp, and lobster may also be used.[2] The practice is controversial owing to concerns about the animal's suffering, as it is seemingly alive when served.
The restaurant may have one or several tanks of live sea animals for a customer to choose from. There are different styles in which a chef may serve the dish but the most common way is to serve it on a plate with the filleted meat assembled on top of the body.
Ikizukiri may be prepared with only three knife cuts by the chef.[1] They are usually presented with the head still whole so that customers are able to see the continuing gill movements.[3]
look at the video, it's FUCKED UP. they removed all the meat from the fish and kept it alive attempting to breath on the plate covered in food
With net fishing, they're still out of the water quite a long time whilst being hauled up, dumped, and sorted before being thrown in their sorted holding tank.
there's a trend on TikTok where you catfish (heh) men and ask them what their favorite fishing spot is
that's why there is Ikejime, the japanese method to dispatch fish
I just use a fish bonker. A firm strike at the base of the head with a club is instant. I can't say if it preserves the meat as I normally eat it right away or store it for the winter months in the freezer.
This is why you just shoot them in the head with a harpoon when you take them out of the water
Most fish are caught using trawling nets, which as far as I know, can be up to 50 miles long. Gonna need a fucking attack helicopter to handle all that.
can be up to 50 miles long
I think maybe this should be meters?
Yes 50 meters long lol
and still have room for some of Jersey.
nets...Jersey...
Jersey...nets...
New Jersey Nets
Oh. My. God.
Poor thing :(
Bring back dynamite fishing then!
I was under the impression that to a fish pain is more of a "get out of there" signal than what it is to us.
is what happens to us not in fact a "get out of here" signal to us? what makes you think a fishes subjective experience of pain is any more pleasant than your own?
Our pain isn't a "get out of here" signal, it's a "you've been hurt" signal. Fish don't have a reason to suffer. We do, because we're social creatures.
🤔
I've heard that water-boarding is a very intense form of torture; and that is essentially about making a person feel like they are drowning. I wonder how the fish experience compares.
Nice fluff piece, but it's still complete speculation as to how fish "feel" when out of water or anything else. Currently, science can't tell if a fish can hurt in the same sense that humans can.
If they come up with something dirt cheap to kill them faster, I'm all for it. No down side to give a fish the benefit of the doubt. This isn't something I'm going to worry about, though.
Broadly scientific consensus is that at least bony fish likely experience pain in all of the same quantifiable ways that humans do. They exhibit avoidance learning, they have a central nervous system, nociceptors, opiod receptors, exhibit reduced avoidance responses to noxious stimuli when given analgesics.. Etc.
The few scientists that have argued over the years that fish likely do not or cannot experience pain have been in the minority in the last 50 years, and each passing year finds decreased evidence for their claims. Dismissing it all as 'complete speculation' is.. Very inaccurate.
Worth reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_fish
Also - there already is "something dirt cheap to kill them faster" - hardwood fish bat. Lasts forever and instantly stuns, and with a couple of strong well-aimed blows will definitely kill.
If people can invent industrial fishing machines that net thousands of fish at a time then there's nothing stopping them from inventing a fast, clean fish kill method at scale.
If they can't, then perhaps that method of fishing is unethical and unsustainable.
Maybe they are kinky. Idk.
OK but how do we know their response to the phenomenon in this article is experienced by the fish in a way akin to pain and not akin to fear or anxiety? (Or all of the above). Its just weird for the article to say a fish is for sure feeling pain, and not provide actual evidence for that.
I'm not saying the experience isn't awful for it, so please dont turn the conversation that way.
Why/how are the two connected?
Delicious long pig addiction? Lol
Little of A little of B, there are bigger issues that the possible suffering of fish, and in the long run I don’t care enough about the possible suffering of fish to change my diet choices.
Why/how are the two connected?
Interesting, I always cared about the suffering of animals far more than us stupid greedy humans
@lemmy.world
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
go to feed...
So fishing for sport where they catch and release is basically torture by getting injured by the hook and then asphyxiating for however long they are out of water before being released.
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