can fish feel pain?

There's a soft part on the front. Anyway, there's no way to kill an animal without some pain involved. Knowing that they feel pain isn't enough to make me stop eating them.
 
animals have a considerable survival instinct. If an animal asumes that there life is endanger they'll take the pain to get away. Humans aren't exactly like that. We consider the pain first. In animals pain seems to be a signal to engage survival mode.
 
Pain is an evolutionary survival trait. Any higher animal like a fish certainly feels pain as a warning signal.

Certain necessary processes continue independently in an animal so that whereas a fish remembers about being fed every day and what to do when the next feeding comes along, that is not a sign of intelligence among them.

As to lobsters, I think if anything were thrown into a pot of boiling water, they would instantly die of the equivalent of a heart attack. It is said that the noise they make is merely air coming out of and going through their bodies. Burned corpses will sometimes sit up due to the gases inside them.
 
Till Eulenspiegel said:
While I can't say definitively that fish do not feel pain I tend to agree with Dr. Rose. Fish might feel something but I don't think it is what humans call pain.

"Do fish feel pain?
The world's foremost expert on the subject is Dr. James D. Rose of the University of Wyoming. He's spent 30 years working on questions of neurology, examining data on the responses of animals to painful stimuli. In 2003 Rose published a landmark study in the journal Reviews of Fisheries Science, concluding that animals need specific regions of the cerebral cortex in order to feel pain. And fish do not have them.

But doesn't it hurt to have a hook in your mouth?

There's a big difference between pain and the perception of pain (which scientists call "nociception"). Dr. Rose explained to London's Telegraph newspaper:

"Pain is predicated on awareness … A person who is anaesthetized in an operating theatre will still respond physically to an external stimulus, but he or she will not feel pain. Anyone who has seen a chicken with its head cut off will know that, while its body can respond to stimuli, it cannot be feeling pain."
I don't imagine animal-rights activists are very fond of Dr. Rose.

Right you are. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for instance, operates a misleading "Fishing Hurts" propaganda campaign based on the work of a few "neutral" experts. (PETA says Dr. Rose isn't neutral because he enjoys fishing.) One of PETA's experts is a "Professor of Animal Welfare" who also believes it's cruel to raise faster-growing cows and turkeys. Another is a microbiologist who claims it's "unthinkable that fish do not have pain receptors" -- despite having done no scientific work with fish -- and equates our "lack of justice and compassion to other animals" with human slavery.

It's worth noting that PETA has sought fishing bans in state parks and called for a Constitutional amendment protecting fish. In 2005 when PETA tried to scare fishermen away from their sport by claiming fish contain "poison," campaign director Bruce Friedrich admitted his strategy on an animal-rights mailing list: "For people who don't care about the suffering of fish, I suspect this will terrify them into not eating them."

What about lobsters and crabs? Do they feel pain when they're boiled or steamed?

A 2005 Norwegian study reported that lobsters and crabs don't have the capacity to feel pain either. The British Guardian newspaper detailed the study's findings, explaining that lobsters and crabs have only about 100 thousand neurons. Many vertebrates have upwards of 100 billion. "

http://fishscam.com/faqPain.cfm
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Sorry but what bullshit. Pain is pain. Fish feel it, just like you.
 
Yorda said:
All animals (including fish, whale etc), insects and crabs feel pain.
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That's not a very scientific thing to say on a science website. All vertebrates and all cartilaginous fishes? Sure. We all have a central nervous system with lots of sensory nerves connecting our skin to our brain. We humans and our closest companion animals all have consciousness so we extrapolate that attribute to the other animals that are built like us.

But arthropods--insects, arachnids, myriapedes, crustaceans and a few odds and ends? They have nerves but there's no centralization. Much of their activity is what in a vertebrate would be called reflex: nerve impulses traveling to a regional nerve center, triggering an autonomic response. Do they feel the touch that causes them to back away from danger, or does it just happen?

Do arthropods even have a consciousness with which to feel pain--or anything else? And supposing that they do, do the lower phyla have it? AFAIK flatworms don't have anything resembling a brain. Amoebae don't have anything resembling nerves. How could these animals feel pain?
 
Enmos said:
A crab's face :)
Oh uhm.. better follow the link, the image is a bit large.
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mtrager/crab2.JPG
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But where does it start? I would hate to miss part of it and it keeps walking around thinking its alive (like this chicken did)

mike.jpg

Notice his face on the floor??
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Do arthropods even have a consciousness with which to feel pain--or anything else?
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Why limit consciousness to brains and nerves? I see no reason to assume that even atoms could not feel something. Atoms are in motion, like microorganisms, so what causes that motion? If consciousness causes animals and humans to move, why couldn't consciousness also cause insects, microorganisms and even atoms to move? What difference is there between consciousness and natural laws?

AFAIK flatworms don't have anything resembling a brain. Amoebae don't have anything resembling nerves. How could these animals feel pain?
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Because if you cut a worm in half you can see (scientific observation) that it's hurt because it reacts like any other animal. But I doubt insects are as conscious as big animals, so they might also experience their feelings as less extreme.
 
It seems some posters are anthropomorphizing all living things. Humans and higher animals feel pain (an admitted) therefore all animals and even non-living things like atoms feel pain. While this may be a great emotional argument that is all it is, an emotional argument.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
That's not a very scientific thing to say on a science website. All vertebrates and all cartilaginous fishes? Sure. We all have a central nervous system with lots of sensory nerves connecting our skin to our brain. We humans and our closest companion animals all have consciousness so we extrapolate that attribute to the other animals that are built like us.

But arthropods--insects, arachnids, myriapedes, crustaceans and a few odds and ends? They have nerves but there's no centralization. Much of their activity is what in a vertebrate would be called reflex: nerve impulses traveling to a regional nerve center, triggering an autonomic response. Do they feel the touch that causes them to back away from danger, or does it just happen?

Do arthropods even have a consciousness with which to feel pain--or anything else? And supposing that they do, do the lower phyla have it? AFAIK flatworms don't have anything resembling a brain. Amoebae don't have anything resembling nerves. How could these animals feel pain?
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They feel it but may not be consciously aware of it.
 
Orleander said:
But where does it start? I would hate to miss part of it and it keeps walking around thinking its alive (like this chicken did)

mike.jpg

Notice his face on the floor??
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I don't know, maybe you can find some image of a dissected crab or something. My knowledge of crab anatomy is insufficient to accurately answer the question. But then, I highly doubt the ones cutting off the crab faces know exactly where the heads start, they just cut away a chunk ;)
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
That's not a very scientific thing to say on a science website. All vertebrates and all cartilaginous fishes? Sure. We all have a central nervous system with lots of sensory nerves connecting our skin to our brain. We humans and our closest companion animals all have consciousness so we extrapolate that attribute to the other animals that are built like us.

But arthropods--insects, arachnids, myriapedes, crustaceans and a few odds and ends? They have nerves but there's no centralization. Much of their activity is what in a vertebrate would be called reflex: nerve impulses traveling to a regional nerve center, triggering an autonomic response. Do they feel the touch that causes them to back away from danger, or does it just happen?
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Of course they have centralization. read a frikking text book. and don't accuse other people of saying unscientific things

FFS

frikking dissected locust brains with my own hands.

Try cutting their heads off.

See how well organized the response is from the rest of the body.
 
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of course, they can feel pain even if they can't say 'hey buddy!! that hurts you jerk!!!!'

poor fish can't speak. cute things
 
Till Eulenspiegel said:
It seems some posters are anthropomorphizing all living things. Humans and higher animals feel pain (an admitted) therefore all animals and even non-living things like atoms feel pain. While this may be a great emotional argument that is all it is, an emotional argument.
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energy is imaginative. i'm not assigning human traits to energy. instead, human traits are the result of energy's characteristics.
 
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