November 18, 2015 — I am passionate. I must be – I am a scientist. And I admire people who are passionate. I thus admire Dr. Sylvia Earle for her passionate work in relation to saving the oceans. However, as a scientist I am also an advocate of unbiased scientific facts. I thus feel unease whenever facts are inappropriately represented or biased information misused for bold claims how the world should be and how others should behave. In a recent lengthy feature in Outside Magazine the author, Ian Frazier, reports on the life achievements of Sylvia Earle. Therein one can find the following passage:

“You know that the misconception that fish can’t feel pain has been completely disproven, don’t you?” she [Sylvia Earle] asked. I said yes, I had seen studies in which fish jaws were injected with bee venom and the fish showed pain. I said I knew hooks hurt, having sometimes hooked myself.

This and some other verbiage in the article is used to showcase how terrible fishing is because it induces suffering in the world of fishes that show individuality and personality. We have a case of practical animal liberation or even animal rights philosophy at play where the suffering in the world of fishes is traded-off against the benefits of fishing to humans. Animal liberation and animal rights both are deeply anti-fishing. Usually humans tend to lose the moral balancing act because fishing is perceived by some, including Earle, as unnecessary cruelty.

That would not be a problem, per se. However, all statements in the above quotation are factually contested at best, and wrong at worst. First, fish are not known for sure to be able to feel pain or to suffer despite repeated claims for the opposite. Second, all reactions by rainbow trout in the famous “bee venom” study alluded to by Frazier are fully compatible with simple nociception, which is not pain. Third, there is also no evidence that hooks hurt fishes other than the physical damage they induce; in fact, there is strong evidence that Atlantic cod do not show any reactions at all, neither physiological nor behavioural, when hooked by a fishing hook in the lip without an associated pull on a line. They are thus unlikely to be in pain, or they show pain different to us humans. Both issues are problematic and cast doubts onto the interpretation of published behavioural experiments supposed to provide evidence for pain in fishes. In short: inferring pain from fish behaviours or from higher order cognitive concepts such as “intelligence” or “personality” is impossible because pain lacks construct ability, i.e., there is no possibility to infer pain from physiological and behavioural measures in fishes.

However, there is a simple argument that fish are unlikely to feel pain in a human or mammalian sense. When one pulls on a hook embedded in a lip of a fish, the fish, e.g., the cod in the experiment above, would fight in opposite directions to the pulling strength. This is what anglers call a fight. Imagine you would pull on a bull ring attached through the nose of kettle. The kettle would tamely follow the pulling strength, to avoid pain, the exact opposite what fishes do. Didn’t I just say we should not infer anything about the emotional life of fishes from plain behavioural data because we are humans, not fishes? Indeed. But let’s for the sake of argument anthropomorphizes how a fish might feel when hooked by a fishing hook, as Frazier does. When taken this stance, one would need to conclude from the above that fish apparently do everything (swim in opposite direction to pulling strength) to feel “pain” when hooked. One could thus conclude that fish are not only feeling “pain,” but they are likely masochistic creatures because they induce this pain on purpose. It is unlikely that any living creature would do this if they indeed would feel something that we humans call pain when hooked by a fishing hook.

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