[thechat] Fish do feel pain

[Mike Migurski]

>>>Fish do feel pain
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>
>Thanks!  That was an interesting article.
>
>[I don't think it was a surprising article ... I would have guessed the
>ability to recognize and react to pain would have been a very early
>evolutionary development.]

What surprised me was the title - the leap from responsiveness to damaging
physical stimuli, to subjective experience of pain is a huge one.

One can be proven objectively, the other can't. I'd imagine that to "feel
pain" in a human sense is as dependent on language and a sense of
individual self as it is on certain expected movements and behaviors.
Sunflowers move in response to the direction of the sun - does this mean
they can 'see' ?

In other words, don't anthropomorphosize salmon, they hate that. :)


>However, although I haven't been fishing for a very long time ...
>I really don't think this would dissuade me from going again.

Don't worry. My girlfriend is a vegetarian, and her personal criteria for
deciding whether she can eat something is "does it blink?"


---------------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- contact info and pgp key:
sf/ca            http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html