
Fish Have Feelings Too - hecubus
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/20/482468094/fish-have-feelings-too-the-inner-lives-of-our-underwater-cousins
======
codezero
I stopped eating meat after stories last summer highlighted people eating dog
at a festival in China.

I was very upset, and mad, but then I asked myself, why was eating dog so
upsetting? The dogs eaten in China were much less abused than any animal eaten
in the US. We have industrialized the slaughter of animals.

Either I am OK with dogs being eaten, or I am not OK with the industrialized
slaughter of every other animal.

I still love the smell of meat. I remember the things I loved to eat, and it's
a struggle, but we (many of us at least) live in a world where we don't need
to imprison and eat animals to sustain our lives.

With all that said, I don't expect anyone else to feel the same way. We're
slaughtering animals constantly, and I don't have any expectation that anyone
stop eating animals.

~~~
reality_czech
Your problem is that you are unable to distinguish between humans and other
animals. The human tendency to anthromorphize the world is overwhleming.
That's why ancient peoples had stories about Mr. Sun and Mrs. Moon as sentient
entities controlling the world. But it just ain't so.

For example, dogs may be loyal companions, but they are also animals. A bitch
will eat her own pups if there is not enough food. As with other animals, dogs
don't have culture or morality, just instinct and social hierarchies. Cruelty
to animals is wrong, but because of the effect it has on the humans, not on
the animals. To animals it is just the workings of nature, and animals can and
do kill each other, burrow inside eat other and eat each other from the inside
out, dig up corpses and play with them, etc. etc. Nature is not your friend--
it's not anyone's friend, and it doesn't wear a human face.

Morality is a human thing. Ironically, people who try to impose some kind of
human morality on animals are often the cruellest to them. For example, cats
are obligate meat eaters, order Carnivora. They are designed from the ground
up as killing machines for mice, birds, and other small animals. They cannot
even taste sugar or sweetness in their food, and they certainly don't have
grinding teeth to eat plants. But some misguided humans attempt to feed them a
vegan diet and they suffer greatly.

Nearly all farm animals would be extinct if it weren't for human desire for
their meat and other products. Maybe goats could survive, but certainly not
cows or chickens. But vegans seem to think genociding their species is better
than having them live on farms.

~~~
nefitty
Codezero doesn't have a problem. Living according to ethical ideals is a
difficult endeavor. People should expect to struggle with any project that is
worth pursuing.

I personally wouldn't have a problem if cows or other farm animals went
extinct. The point to me is to reduce the net suffering in the world. You can
drag that sentiment to its logical conclusion (the extinction of all life),
but I'm of course also guided by emotion, reason, survival instincts, etc.
which puts a practical bound on how far the idea should go. If we can't
ethically care for a species that depends on us for survival then better to
let it fade away.

~~~
codezero
And cows don't have a problem if you go extinct. Wouldn't it be nice if they
did... and you did? We could help each other.

~~~
reality_czech
Cool, my first death threat on HN.

------
nefitty
It gets harder everyday for me to justify consuming any type of animal
product. I wish there wasn't so much distance between vegetarianism/veganism
and mainstream morality. I understand that hard line ethical stances are off-
putting, especially when it comes to ingrained cultural behaviors like eating.
I'm glad these types of articles and research are getting attention, though.
Society benefits the more conscientious people become about their everyday
choices.

~~~
tw04
A lion wouldn't struggle with eating you if given the option, why would you
waste time returning the favor? I get making a concerted effort to make sure
animals don't suffer in the process of becoming food as much as humanly
possible, but refusing to eat other animals when you're an apex predator is...
silly. For starters, you may quickly find yourself no longer apex. Do you
enjoy spending time outdoors without fearing for your life?

~~~
rosser
Lions don't have prefrontal cortices. Humans aren't obligate carnivores.

Yes, we're omnivores, but we have a choice to engage more ethically with the
animals we choose to put on our plates. To point to animals that _have to kill
other animals or they will die_ as normative for our behavior is fatuously
specious.

------
wyager
I am almost certain that 100 years from now, almost everyone will look back on
the farming of sentient animals in the same way we look back on human slavery.

Meat farming is more or less essential to our standard of living and it's
completely socially normalized, and yet there are obvious and compelling moral
arguments against it. The same was true of slavery 250 years ago.

As with slavery and the industrial revolution, I suspect improved technology
(i.e. tank-grown meat) will eliminate our dependence on meat farming, and its
social acceptability will soon follow.

I say this as someone who eats meat from sentient animals, but recognizes that
vegans have a uniquely coherent, self-consistent, and compelling set of
arguments against the practice.

~~~
13of40
> tank grown meat

You know, for less trouble we could just switch to eating the cows when they
die of natural causes.

~~~
wyager
The meat from old animals does not taste good.

~~~
13of40
Do you have personal experience with this? I've always assumed that we
exclusively eat one or two year old animals because of the needs of
industrialized agriculture, like tomatoes that ripen in the warehouse...

~~~
wyager
Yes. Old animals are usually gamier and have worse flavor. An animal that died
of old age probably tastes horrible. I mean, think about it; they're not dying
because their flesh is in great condition.

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Raed667
I honestly can't seem to care whether the things I'm eating have feelings or
not. But I'm considering cutting down on meat (especially bovine) because of
its carbon footprint.

~~~
codezero
have you eaten human yet? if you don't care about feelings, then this should
be on your menu.

~~~
Raed667
<sarcasm> Next time I see human meat displayed in a store I'll give it a try.
</sarcasm>

~~~
codezero
If people were so brave, they'd likely realize how delicious it is :)

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kranner
Unfortunately none of the examples provided in the article (I haven't read the
book) prove sentience or suffering as a result of pain. They demonstrate pain,
but it can be argued that the pain that fish feel is nonconscious/nonsentient.

I'm only complaining that the proof here isn't watertight btw. As a former-
meateater-turned-vegetarian (because of 'sentience' guilt) my intuition is
that the pain they feel must be similar to the pain we feel.

~~~
rosser
Epistemic asymmetry. You can't even prove that the pain-behavior you observe
me demonstrating reflects an internal experience that's anything like your
experience of pain, so asking for "proof" that a fish's pain is actually
_painful_ isn't even an objectively meaningful question.

~~~
kranner
Red herring :) I know I can't know what it's like to be a bat, but maybe
suffering in fish can be demonstrated via FMRI. Perhaps it has been but this
article doesn't mention it. Just because something shows avoidance behaviour
against a chemical gradient doesn't follow that it _suffers_.

~~~
rosser
Suffering is experiential and subjective. Pain is measurable, in terms of
neurotransmitters and electrical activity. Different people can tolerate pain
wildly differently. The same person can tolerate pain wildly differently,
depending upon circumstances. One can't even meaningfully draw a straight-line
relationship from pain to suffering between individuals of the same species,
let alone across as wide a gulf as fish to humans.

~~~
kranner
I understood your point the first time. I'm talking about the leap made
between the article's contents and the headline.

Edit: we might mean somewhat different things by 'suffering'. I'm talking
about an experience usually (but not always) concomitant with pain that can be
measured objectively. Is there such a thing? Can it be measured? I don't know
for sure. I _feel_ that it must be there in fish too, but the shallow
conflation in this article of suffering and seeming-to-act-under-suffering is
a problem for me.

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pvaldes
Zebra fish feel pain, as everybody knew before, because... they have pain
receptors. This is extrapolated somehow to: The 31.000 species of fish extant
"have feelings too", that is a big jump in my opinion.

Last hour news: Corals and slugs also can feel pain.

Ehhhmmm... Was this experiment really neccessary to the improvement of the
human knowledge? Where is my big surprise?

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douche
Is anybody surprised that fish are kind of sentient? Nevertheless, they are
still really tasty...

