I’ll be vegan once we figure out how to stop killing other humans.
Why/how are the two connected?
Delicious long pig addiction? Lol
Wait, this is the fabled “I’m pre-vegan” gloat? I did not think I would ever see it.
I will care about the suffering of fish at the hands of humans once we end human suffering at the hands of other humans.
Why/how are the two connected?
Is your empathy so small you cannot cope with 2 things at the same time, or you just don’t care?
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.
Interesting, I always cared about the suffering of animals far more than us stupid greedy humans
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.
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.
Bring back dynamite fishing then!
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.
I’m sorry but that’s idiotic
The hell you mean? Of course it senses hurt. Why do you think humans are special cause we say ow?
What the fuck.
Maybe they are kinky. Idk.
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.
That bat isn’t feasible hauling a thousand fish in on a net, though. That’s for when I catch some crappie or trout with my fishing pole.
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.
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.
Feeling like a fish out of water is sounds much darker now.
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?
Noodling is basically cat fish hunting by allowing the catfish to bit onto your arm and you lift it out of the water onto the shore.
Wow. Thanks.
While the description is correct, it doesn’t really come close to how insane this looks. Treat yourself to some soaked rednecks on YouTube 💕
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
Not really deep down, but yes
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.
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.
So long as you release them after a few minutes, they feel no pain whatsoever. Not even the hook through their mouth or gills.
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.
Sorry, classic case of Poe’s law! There are plenty of people who write what you said without any sarcasm, so without any indicators there’s no way to know.
Hah, I figured the second sentence was as parodically on-the-nose as I could manage without a satire indicator.
Sadly people literally write that and mean it. See the other reply:
They really don’t seem to be bothered by it.
Same reasoning behind not giving infants anesthetics during surgery.
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.
how would you like to get a hook through the cheek while moseying around the house? Yeah, didn’t think so.
Most of them die after that.
That’s a pretty bold claim, do you have a source for that?
https://myoutdoorbasecamp.com/catch-and-release-fishing/
Up to 40% about 5-6 days mortality rate.
Not some anecdotal bullshit happening within a day and they actually tagged fish. Not just guessing. These were actual studies.
They really don’t seem to be bothered by it
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of vegans suddenly cried out in terror
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
Suddenly all the cutesy indie life sims with fishing minigames don’t seem so wholesome any more
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. Suee, in a philosophical sense it’s immposible to know what other creatures think, even other humans that can verbally communicate, but that ignores some of the more obvious context clues.
Except it isn’t reasonable to think a fish interprets pain feeling “painful” the same way humans do. We don’t know that’s a fish “hurts”.
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.
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?
If by “release” you mean “keep alive out of the water until they die in 22 minutes” then yeah, that’s a barbaric way to release D:
Yes, I’d say so.
Catch and release is animal abuse and luckily prohibited here
Where is fishing banned?
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.
Now that’s a job of the future - commandeering a Boeing AH-64E Apache to pulverise several thousand tonnes of fish trapped in a trawling net. Isn’t nature beautiful?
can be up to 50 miles long
I think maybe this should be meters?
Yes 50 meters long lol
World’s largest net. So big it can cover New York City and still have room for some of Jersey.
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.
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.
And yet others will prepare Ikizukuri.
Wow that’s so fucked up
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
There are a small subset there that are pathologically obsessed with the freshness of the fish they eat. Getting parasites from barely prepped sushi is not uncommon.
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!
it’s a lot manlier and cooler to stand in the water and grab the fish with your bare hands anyways, then you can look it in the face and tell it to fear god before letting it go
You could even do a Hakka and watch the fish pee themselves! But a gentle slaps would also be satiafrying.
Where did they throw the speaker?
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.
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.
Let their lungs collapse?..
Yes. The g folds in front and everything shortens.
That’s why we call them gls.
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.
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
Our population voted someone into the highest office riding on the promise of drilling for more oil and increasing factory farming. We have atomized our culture so much that corporate forces have stripped people of their empathy and care and passion like an overripe banana and we don’t mix perspectives anymore so that we can pull people back.
There’s no hope of ending this misery until those of us who remain thinking with our minds get off the computer and start socializing, organizing, challenging people and pulling people into our idea of a better tomorrow. Most people don’t even know where to find other people to talk to and debate with and this is by design. That’s the trap we’re in we need to break free of, and then maybe if we can get to that point we can start making cultured meats and alternative proteins a thing.
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.
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.
I’m still not going to tell you where my secret fishing spot is, no matter how many times you ask or scientific studies you perform.
there’s a trend on TikTok where you catfish (heh) men and ask them what their favorite fishing spot is
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?
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Ya, probably.
Something in the way…
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.
