Evidences Link Answers To Question “Do Fish Have Feelings?”

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Author Jonathan Balcombe, director of animal sentience for the Human Society Institute for Science and Policy, believes that there is proof to show that humans are indeed closer to understanding the nature of fish and how they live.

Do fish have feelings? Yes

Balcombe, who spent years studying the nature and behaviour of fish, says that science has indeed found ways to show proof that fish do have feelings,

“Thanks to the breakthroughs in ethology, sociobiology, neurobiology and ecology, we can now better understand what the world looks like to fish,” says Balcombe.

Balcombe points out that fish is equipped with a sense of conscious awareness called ‘sentience’ that lets them feel pain, be able to recognize facial images and even memory.

This, Balcombe says, may be something that man needs to consider moral implications of how humans farm and catch fish.

“We humans kill between 150 billion and over 2 trillion fishes a year. … And the way they die — certainly in commercial fishing — is really pretty grim and there’s a lot of change that would be needed to reflect an improvement in our relationship with fishes,” says Balcombe.

In his new book, What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins, Balcombe argues that aside from his studies, many of the findings are also corroborated by studies made by many scientists on studies about marine life.

One such example is the zebra fish, where they were made to choose between two environments – one lush and the other barren – where the fish chose the lively environment.

Then researchers began to intervene by injecting small amount of an acidic solution and some with a saline solution for which the pain was only caused by the needle prick. The researchers then added an antiseptic solution in the barren part of the tank and some of the fish injected with the pain-inducing acid began to swim to the medicated area.

Another study also shows that fish are able to identify human facial images. A recent study involving archerfish were able to identify human facial images that were the subject of their exposure for days. The fish were then able to accurately target the images 80 percent of the time.

Balcombe added that this awareness may be able to spark interest and probably some measures on how fish are being caught or raised in farms and be able to apply some moral factors and measures as indeed there’s proof to answer the question do fish have feelings.

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