How Conscious Can A Fish Be?

about

When it comes how we treat fish, there is a paradox with devastating consequences.

On one hand, fish are the animals that we kill in the largest number for food, by far. Even a conservative estimate of how many we kill yearly is about 2 trillion, which is 17 times the number of humans who have ever lived.

On the other hand however, fish are the animals we protect the least from cruelty and suffering, both culturally and legally. Culturally, yanking them out of the water and suffocating them is considered a fun day out, and legally most laws that protect animals exclude them altogether.

In practice, this means that out of all the animals we use for food, fish are the animals who most likely suffer the most, both in numbers and intensity.

And one of the reasons for this is our outdated and inaccurate perception of fish. Unlike dogs, cats, chickens and pigs who we recognize are individuals who feel, think and suffer, we often think of fish as primitive, stupid animals who can’t feel pain. This allows us to not only disregard their suffering, but to dismiss the conversation entirely by saying: “who cares? It’s just a fish”.

That’s why, in this film, we cover the evidence that suggests that fish feel, think and suffer, much like dogs, cats and other animals. We introduce you to the smartest fish in the world, delve deep into the twisted research that ‘s been done on pain in fish, and answer the age old question: “does a goldfish have a 3 second memory?”

sources

"a video aired on TV featuring a goldfish by the name of Albert Einstein the 2nd."

About the campaign
Full video

"the first ever recorded video of a fish using a tool"

The original video
Wong, K 2011, “Tool Using Fish Caught On Tape”, Scientific American

"it had only been about 50 years since Jane Goodall documented tool use in animals for the first time"

Timeline: The Jane Goodall Institute
Mckie, R 2010, “Chimps with everything: Jane Goodall's 50 years in the jungle”, The Guardian
Nicholls, H 2014, “Jane Goodall: How she redefined mankind, BBC

"But the feats of both Albert and this tuskfish are not exceptional."

Jones, A.M., Brown, C. & Gardner, S. Tool use in the tuskfish Choerodon schoenleinii?. Coral Reefs 30, 865 (2011).
Pryor, KJ, Milton, AM. Tool use by the graphic tuskfish Choerodon graphicus. J Fish Biol. 2019; 95: 663– 667
Habas, C, 2016, “Yes, You Can Train Your Goldfish!”, The Pet Blog Lady

"the part of our brains that makes it possible for us to do stuff like this is this outer layer right here: the cerebral cortex."

Jawabri KH, Sharma S. Physiology, Cerebral Cortex Functions. [Updated 2021 May 4]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2021 Jan
Bailey, Regina. (2021, February 16). What Does the Brain's Cerebral Cortex Do?
Chimpanzee Brain Facts, National Chimpanzee Brain Resource

"But if you take a look at the brain of a goldfish or a tuskfish, like all fish, their cerebral cortex is… Well, it doesn’t exist. This is the reality that certain people like these scientists use to argue that [...] they’re probably not even conscious and don’t have the capacity to feel pain."

Rose, J.D., Arlinghaus, R., Cooke, S.J., Diggles, B.K., Sawynok, W., Stevens, E.D. and Wynne, C.D.L. (2014), Can fish really feel pain?. Fish Fish, 15: 97-133

CHAPTER 1: CONSCIOUSNESS

"In 2014, researchers subjected a group of redtail splitfins to this situation." (the Ebbinghaus illusion)

Sovrano, Valeria & Albertazzi, Liliana & Salva, Orsola. (2014). The Ebbinghaus illusion in a fish (Xenotoca eiseni). Animal cognition. 18. 10.1007/s10071-014-0821-5.

"Atlantic cods can hear frequencies 20 times lower than the lowest frequencies we can hear"

Sand, O & Karlsen, Hans. (2000). Detection of infrasound and linear acceleration in fishes. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences. 355.

"salmon can detect a smell that’s been diluted to a concentration of one part to 80 million"

J. R. McBride, D. R. Idler, R. E. E. Jonas, and N. Tomlinson. Olfactory Perception in Juvenile Salmon.: I. Observations on Response of Juvenile Sockeye to Extracts of Foods. Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. 19(2): 327-334.

"catfish can have 100 times more tastebuds than humans"

Finger, T.E., Drake, S.K., Kotrschal, K., Womble, M. and Dockstader, K.C. (1991), Postlarval growth of the peripheral gustatory system in the channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus. J. Comp. Neurol., 314: 55-66.

"Looking back in time, it was 400 million years ago that our evolutionary ancestors first crawled out of the ocean, and before then life had been thriving almost exclusively underwater."

Marshall, M 2009, “Timeline: the evolution of life”, NewScientist

“140 million years before that, an era called the Cambrian Explosion started [...] fish are the ones we inherited consciousness from”

Godfrey-Smith, P 2020, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, eReader version
The Cambrian Explosion: The Burgess Shale

CHAPTER 2: INTELLIGENCE

"This is a mangrove forest. A place that’s home to countless animals we could spend hours meeting."

Mangroves, Ocean Find Your Blue

"the archerfish when aiming must consider distance, angle, and how gravity will curve the trajectory of their jet"

Stefan Schuster; Hunting in archerfish – an ecological perspective on a remarkable combination of skills. J Exp Biol 15 December 2018; 221 (24): jeb159723.
Balcombe, J 2016, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, eReader version

"[archerfish] take into account exactly how far their target is, and shoot their jet so its tail end catches up with its front end exactly on impact, maximizing its attack potency"

Vailati, A., Zinnato, L. and Cerbino, R. (2012). How Archer fish achieve a powerful impact: hydrodynamic instability of a pulsed jet in Toxotes jaculatrix. PLoS ONE 7, e47867.

"[archerfish] must compensate for how light bends when it enters the water through turbulent currents"

Timmermans, P. J. A. (2001). Prey catching in the archer fish: angles and probability of hitting an aerial target. Behav. Proc. 55, 93-105.

"[archerfish] have been seen to become better shooters not just by practicing, but also by observing and learning from the successes and failures of their peers"

Stefan Schuster, Saskia Wöhl, Markus Griebsch, Ina Klostermeier, Animal Cognition: How Archer Fish Learn to Down Rapidly Moving Targets, Current Biology, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2006, P 378-383

"in the lab, [archerfish] have been successfully trained to recognize specific human faces"

Cait Newport, Guy Wallis, Ulrike E. Siebeck, Object recognition in fish: accurate discrimination across novel views of an unfamiliar object category (human faces), Animal Behaviour, Volume 145, 2018, Pages 39-49

"researchers presented a group of well bluestreak wrasses with two plates of food: one red, and one blue"

Salwiczek LH, Prétôt L, Demarta L, Proctor D, Essler J, et al. (2012) Adult Cleaner Wrasse Outperform Capuchin Monkeys, Chimpanzees and Orang-utans in a Complex Foraging Task Derived from Cleaner – Client Reef Fish Cooperation. PLOS ONE 7(11): e49068.

"one of the researchers decided to try the experiment again, but this time at home with his 4 year old daughter"

Abbott, A. Animal behaviour: Inside the cunning, caring and greedy minds of fish. Nature 521, 412–414 (2015)

"imagine you’re a hungry bluestreak wrasse, and these 2 clients appear in front of you, looking to be cleaned"

"A cleaner wrasse can sometimes clean up to 2000 other individuals a day"

Grutter, Alexandra. (1996). Grutter, A. S. Parasite removal rates by the cleaner wrasse Labroides dimidiatus. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 130, 61-70. Marine Ecology-progress Series - MAR ECOL-PROGR SER. 130. 61-70. 10.3354/meps130061.

"Behavioral traits, personality, and intelligence all also play a role in helping an animal successfully survive and reproduce, and also evolve and develop over time"

Cauchoix M and Chaine AS (2016) How Can We Study the Evolution of Animal Minds? Front. Psychol. 7:358.
Gopnik, A 2016, How Animals Think, The Atlantic

“We obviously attach immense importance to abstract thought and language” “but in the larger scheme of things this is only one way to face the problem of survival.”

de Waal, F 2017, Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?, eReader version

"much like we have learned to pack massive computing power in tiny computer chips, nature over millions of years has found a way to pack massive brainpower in tiny tiny brains"

Sy Montgomery, Deep Intellect: Inside the mind of the octopus

CHAPTER 3: PAIN

“Lynne Sneddon [...] injected the lips of rainbow trouts with acetic acid, observed that it resulted in them rocking back and forth [...] and concluded that they must be experiencing pain.”

Sneddon, L. U. (2003). The evidence for pain in fish: the use of morphine as an analgesic. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 83(2), 153-162.

'There’s a lot of research that has found results along those lines"

Rudolph H. Ehrensing, Gary F. Michell, Abba J. Kastin, Similar antagonism of morphine analgesia by MIF-1 and naloxone in Carassius auratus, Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, Volume 17, Issue 4, 1982, Pages 757-761

Chervova, L.S., Lapshin, D.N. Behavioral control of the efficiency of pharmacological anesthesia in fish. J. Ichthyol. 51, 1126–1132 (2011)

Lynne U. Sneddon, Trigeminal somatosensory innervation of the head of a teleost fish with particular reference to nociception, Brain Research, Volume 972, Issues 1–2, 2003, Pages 44-52

Rebecca Dunlop, Sarah Millsopp, Peter Laming, Avoidance learning in goldfish (Carassius auratus) and trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and implications for pain perception, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 97, Issues 2–4, 2006, Pages 255-271

Sarah Millsopp, Peter Laming, Trade-offs between feeding and shock avoidance in goldfish (Carassius auratus), Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 113, Issues 1–3, 2008, Pages 247-254

Siobhan C. Reilly, John P. Quinn, Andrew R. Cossins, Lynne U. Sneddon, Behavioural analysis of a nociceptive event in fish: Comparisons between three species demonstrate specific responses, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 114, Issues 1–2, 2008, Pages 248-259

Paul J. Ashley, Sian Ringrose, Katie L. Edwards, Emma Wallington, Catherine R. McCrohan, Lynne U. Sneddon, Effect of noxious stimulation upon antipredator responses and dominance status in rainbow trout, Animal Behaviour, Volume 77, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 403-410

Nordgreen, J., Horsberg, T.E., Ranheim, B. et al. Somatosensory evoked potentials in the telencephalon of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) following galvanic stimulation of the tail. J Comp Physiol A 193, 1235–1242 (2007)

Jonathan A.C. Roques, Wout Abbink, Femke Geurds, Hans van de Vis, Gert Flik, Tailfin clipping, a painful procedure: Studies on Nile tilapia and common carp, Physiology & Behavior, Volume 101, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 533-540

Jessica J. Mettam, Lois J. Oulton, Catherine R. McCrohan, Lynne U. Sneddon, The efficacy of three types of analgesic drugs in reducing pain in the rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 133, Issues 3–4, 2011, Pages 265-274

"the go-to paper for anyone who wants to argue that fish don’t feel pain, and the paper that reviews and debunks all this research"

Rose, J.D., Arlinghaus, R., Cooke, S.J., Diggles, B.K., Sawynok, W., Stevens, E.D. and Wynne, C.D.L. (2014), Can fish really feel pain?. Fish Fish, 15: 97-133

“this notion can easily be dismissed by looking at birds for example, who unambiguously suffer, and yet like fish, also don’t have highly differentiated, pain mediating cortical regions.”

Danbury TC, Weeks CA, Chambers JP, Waterman-Pearson AE, Kestin SC. Self-selection of the analgesic drug carprofen by lame broiler chickens. Vet Rec. 2000 Mar 11

Liz Langley, 2016, The Surprisingly Humanlike Ways Animals Feel Pain, National Geographic

"saying that fish can’t feel pain because they lack a cortex is like saying that humans can’t swim because we lack fins"

Balcombe, J 2016, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, eReader version

"these zebrafish were willing to pay a price - forgo being in the playground to experience the effects of the painkiller"

Sneddon, Lynne. (2011). Pain Perception in Fish Evidence and Implications for the Use of Fish. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 18. 209-229.

"the “absence of a neocortex doesn’t preclude animals from experiencing affective states”"

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012

“evidence supports the position that fin-fish should be accorded the same considerations as terrestrial vertebrates in regard to relief from pain.”

AVMA Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals: 2020 Edition

"a young boy rose to fame in his local town for his unbelievable street performance act: he would walk on burning coal and put knives in his arms, without flinching"

Patricia Reaney, 2007, Pakistani boy leads scientists to pain discovery, Reuters
Nicholas Wade, 2006, Researchers Find Gene Tied to Perception of Pain, The New York Times

"CIP is a condition that takes away people’s capacity to feel pain, and is so rare that only a few hundred people worldwide are estimated to be living with it."

Zhang S, Malik Sharif S, Chen Y, et alClinical features for diagnosis and management of patients with PRDM12 congenital insensitivity to painJournal of Medical Genetics 2016;53:533-535

David Cox, 2017, The curse of the people who never feel pain, BBC

"Ashlyn Blocker is one of those people" (her story)

Justin Heckert, 2012, The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly, The New York Times Magazine

"This is common for children with CIP, and they sometimes sustain life long injuries from childhood accidents"

Drissi I, Woods WA, Woods CG. Understanding the genetic basis of congenital insensitivity to pain. Br Med Bull. 2020 May 15;133(1):65-78

“so few individuals with the disorder reach adulthood.”

David Cox, 2017, The curse of the people who never feel pain, BBC

CHAPTER 4: WHY THIS MATTERS

"589 million is the approximate number of cows we killed for food in 2019, 1.3 billion is that approximate number for pigs, and 79 billion is that approximate number for chickens."

FAO data

"Instead of being estimated by individuals, the number of fish we kill for food is estimated by weight, and according to the FAO’s 2020 report on the state of world fisheries and aquaculture, “global fish production is estimated to have reached about 179 million tonnes in 2018”"

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (2020)

"76 million tonnes of wild caught fish must correspond to between 0.8 and 2.3 trillion fish, and 53 million tonnes of farmed fish must correspond to between 51 and 167 billion fish"

Fishcount estimate (wild fish)
Fishcount estimate (farmed fish)

"2 trillion [is] 17 times the number of humans who have ever lived"

Toshiko Kaneda, Carl Haub, 2021, How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?, PRB

"while there are many different methods of commercial fishing some of the most common ones include..."

Fishing methods and gear types, Marine Stewardship Council
Commercial Fishing Methods, Sustainable Fisheries

"Because these fishing methods more or less indiscriminately trap anyone and everyone who happens to come across them, they all end up catching animals who are not intended to be caught"

On bycatch, WWF
What is bycatch and how can it be managed?, Marine Stewardship Council

"Fishing gear also sometimes gets discarded, leading to animals getting entangled in them"

Ghost Fishing Gear, WWF
Conrad Duncon, 2020, Up to one million tonnes of ‘deadly’ fishing gear left in ocean each year, WWF warns, The Independent

"bottom trawling nets damage habitats by scraping the ocean floor"

Ellie Hooper, 2020, What is bottom trawling and why is it bad for the environment? , Greenpeace
What a Drag: The Global Impact of Bottom Trawling, 2016, USGS
Impacts of Bottom Trawling on Fisheries, Tourism, and the Marine Environment, 2010, Oceana

"we’re pretty much about to set the world record for the fishless oceans speedrun"

What is overfishing?, WWF

"This boat, for example, is a giant deep sea trawler"

On A FISHING EXPEDITION - Germany's Biggest Deep-Sea Trawler, 2021, WELT Documentary

"4000 tonnes of fish had already been caught and processed, which is the approximate weight of 1000 adult asian elephants"

Asian Elephant, National Geographic

"fish can be farmed in tanks, ponds, or pens"

Fishing & Farming Methods, Seafood Watch

"[farmed fish] are generally treated like inanimate objects, and like land animals in a land factory farm they are always packed tightly together. This makes fish farms hotspots for diseases and parasites, and many fish die before reaching slaughter weight [...] they generally die by being crushed under each other’s weight in nets or containers, being dumped in a mixture of ice and water that clogs their gills and freezes them to death, or having their gills cut"

Mark Kurlansky, 2020, Net loss: the high price of salmon farming, The Guardian

Ben Webster, 2021, Waitrose salmon supplier Scottish Salmon Company ‘let fish die on the floor’, The Sunday Times

[2021] INVESTIGATION: Fish Killed While Fully Conscious in Scottish Salmon Slaughterhouse, Animal Equality

[2021] Salmon Suffering In Scottish Fish Farms, Compassion in World Farming

[2021] Violenze Sui Pesci Negli Allevamenti in Grecia, Essere Animali

[2021] Investigation: Rainbow Trout, High-End Trout Farms Prioritising Profit Over Welfare, Viva! Charity

[2020] Investigation: Scottish Salmon, Flesh-Eating Parasitic Sea Lice Invade Scottish Fish Farms, Viva! Charity

[2020] Investigation Reveals Abuse of Sensitive, Intelligent Fish at American Farms, Mercy For Animals

[2019] Aquaculture: A Sea of Suffering, Animal Outlook / Compassion Over Killing

[2017] Salmon Farming is Factory Farming, Sea Shepherd

"according to the owners of the farms they investigated, up to 1 in 5 fish die before slaughter"

[2021] Violenze Sui Pesci Negli Allevamenti in Grecia, Essere Animali

"on multiple occasions, investigators witnessed fish displaying clear signs of consciousness over an hour after being put on ice"

[2018] , Fish farming's cruel secret, Compassion in World Farming

"According to the “European council regulation on the protection of animals at the time of killing” [...] “farm fish are not included in this Regula-”"

Council Regulation on the protection of animal sat the time of killing

"The US’s “Humane methods of livestock slaughter act”, England’s “welfare of animals at the time of killing regulations” and Canada’s guidelines on the humane treatment and slaughter of animals outlined in its “Safe Food for Canadians Regulations” all exclude fish entirely"

Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act [USA]
The Welare of Animals at the Time of Killing Regulations [England]
Safe Food for Canadians Regulations [Canada]

credits