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
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
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.
And yet others will prepare Ikizukuri.
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
Wow that’s so fucked up
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.
I remember there was a study done on how to best slaughter swine (pigs).
The methods that were investigated included: a mechanical hit on the head, suffocation in CO2, and some other measures.
What was found was not only that the suffocation method caused significant stress in the animals, but also that the meat collected this way tasted way worse than meat collected through other slaughtering methods.
this could be relevant in this case: if fish suffocate slowly to death, meat producers might have a financial incentive to change that, to be able to sell better-quality meat, possibly at a higher price. anyways, it would make for good advertisement. that is why meat-producers (fish-producers) should take this seriously.
I never understood the CO2 suffocation idea… I mean, I don’t k ow about fish, but mammals supposedly have a good detection for CO2 in their blood and it’ll set off panic alarms everywhere.
Ignoring the vegetarian discussion for a minute, if they could at least use a different gas, say nitrogen or something, it should be a lot less stressful for the animals
“Are you insane? This gas costs a twelfth of a cent more! There’s no way we could implement this.”
My slaughterhouse uses radon. The meat makes my testicle feel funny, and we throw up a lot. And I haven’t had hair in years. But it’s cheap! And so tender.
I have a crazy idea here. Now hear me out, this is gonna sound like a wackadoodle idea, but,… how about we don’t murder the animals? Crazy, I know.
Yes. It’s crazy. That’s why the vast majority of us don’t do it.
It’s one thing to be a vegetarian for health or environmental reasons.
When you try to convince people that meat==murder, you come across as a wackadoodle.But I’m hungry
eat non-cruel food. actual food. not animals. animals aren’t food for humans.
All animals, us included, are food for other animals, and plants.
That’s what is called an “ecosystem”.
Human beings are omnivores and nature doesn’t moralize.
Good old natural factory meat
This is why I primarily only eat what I shoot, or what I catch.
this depends on where you live, surely. i have open field farms all around me that cooperatively own a slaughterhouse. they sell meat in stores under one brand but you can go to any of the farms and get it directly.
All food is cruel. You can, at most, minimize the cruelty.
But you should know that millions of insects are killed in agriculture. Insects are indeed animals.
You can, if you want, minimize the amount of animals your presence in this world brings to an early death. But you cannot reduce it to zero no even near zero. Probably hundreds of small animals (most insects but surely many other small animals) die each day because things you do.
The line on how much do you want to minimize might be on one place for you, and that’s ok. But you have to respect other people lines as well.
This…plants feel pain. Mushrooms may actually be sentient. Everyone draws their own lines, it doesn’t make them better or worse.
There’s a difference between actively choosing to kill an animal, and having an animal die as a consequence of another action.
Driving a car means that you’ll inevitably hit an animal at some point, but the alternative (walking) is often impractical and you’ll still try your best and stop or swerve when a cat runs into the road.
Eating meat, on the other hand, is an active choice that always involves someone killing an animal. The alternative is always there and is as easy as can be: eat something else.
But you have to respect other people lines as well.
Your personal freedom stops where someone else’s freedom begins. The question is whether you consider animals to be someone or something.
The fact that you don’t see the bugs being killed in the agricultural process do not mean they do not die because of your choosing. Killing bugs is a necessary part of the making of all the food you eat. It’s not an “accident” or “undeliberated”. The word “pesticide” for instance should give you a hint. Also a lot of the cleaning process of any vegetable is meant, among other things, to get rid of any bugs present.
You also, presumably, live in a house, what do you think that happened with the thousands of bugs that used to live in that plot of land. They didn’t die by accident, they died because you wanted a cozy house instead of sleeping on the grass. The clothes you wear, all consumer products you use, your phone. Millions of bug deaths could be prevented if you decided to live caveman style. If they die is your choosing. And everyone else respect that choice. Respect yourself other people choices that imply a small margin more of animal deaths.
If that were true, we wouldn’t be able to digest them. Ever tried eating a tree? Or a boulder? Those aren’t food for humans. I’m not gonna argue against moral motivations for veganism, but I will argue against factually incorrect ones.
Yes they are. They have been for eons. It’s not all they are and people should work towards meatless options and ethical meat like lab grown. But animals are definitely a food source.
I grew up on a farm and enjoy eating meat
Have you tried some good alternatives to meat? Like, try seitan* crumbles in a taco. With all the spices and other toppings it’s really hard to tell the difference. Also, I find it almost impossible to tell an Impossible Whopper with Cheese from a regular Whopper with Cheese, after all the glop they put on it. I know those are both bottom-of-the-barrel meat choices, but maybe branch out and try a thing or two. If you don’t like it - no biggie.
I’ve tried casually dipping my toes into the vegetarian pool with just occasional meat substitutions. Occasionally I find something that’s “No way” but more often than not, I find something that is also really tasty. It’s not meat, but it’s also tasty in a different way, so I don’t miss meat as much. I’ve found vegetarian dishes I actually like. My biggest problem however is getting enough protein in my diet when I start eating mostly veggies.
[* Seitan only if you can handle gluten. Because, it’s like 100% gluten! ]
Meat alternatives are a nice thought. I’m glad they exist for people who can accept them in place of meat. I haven’t found them to be very good substitutes yet so I’m not there. I’ve had the impossible whopper, and while it’s good, it’s not a replacement for me. Hopefully more options come over the years. I’m hopeful for lab grown meat personally since it’d still be meat, just ethically produced.
It’s crazy that people don’t like meat substitutes, but if you tell them it’s not a meat substitute, but actually a special cow from nepal with a different taste, it’s suddenly good and exotic. I hate it when it doesn’t taste like animal suffering.
I don’t want to cause plants pain, that’s why I eat meat
Hilarious
deleted by creator
And the reason we still use CO2 slaughter instead of something like Nitrogen is because… They already have machines built for CO2 and just don’t want to pay the cost of changing practices.
Pure greed and laziness.
Most slaughter houses use bolt guns.
Zero pain, or as minimal amount of pain as possible. Like, microseconds. Because afterwards, the entire brain has been… disorganized.
Most slaughter houses use bolt guns.
It’s hard to find official statistics, but most definitely not.
It is clear, however, that in the United States today, “CO2 stunning of pigs is the major method that is used in large slaughter plants.” According to unpublished data from the Pig Improvement Company, the use of CO2 gas to stun pigs has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1999, CO2 was used to stun 2 percent of all pigs and 2.2 percent of pigs in establishments that slaughtered more than 4,500 pigs per day. By 2020, those numbers had risen to 86.2 percent and 96.2 percent, respectively. Today, according to FSIS enforcement records, at least 32 slaughter plants use CO2 gas slaughter systems.
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/documents/23-05-AWI-05162023.pdf
Zero pain, or as minimal amount of pain as possible. Like, microseconds.
If you assume, that the operator doesn’t make any mistakes and is always 100% on point. Which they are not, as has been documented by countless of hidden cameras people have put up in slaughterhouses.
And even then, you are ignoring the immense pain and stress the animals experience the rest of their life before getting killed.
They just know people will buy the meat no matter how much the animals were abused so why would they bother? Even those who see themselves as animal lovers happily look the other way with every purchase. The industry has all the incentives to be exceptionally cruel so of course it is.
Also co2 is easier because you can fill a pit with it, nitrogen will just float about and disperse.
It’s just heavier??
It tends to be heavier than air, it will therefore accumulate in low places.
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?
Pretty sure he was being sarcastic
Ya, probably.
Something in the way…
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.
Yes, I’d say so.
Catch and release is animal abuse and luckily prohibited here
Where is fishing banned?
Yup. But deep down we all kinda knew that, right? It was always fish torture for sport.
Not really deep down, but yes
Now I’m wondering where noodling is on this scale.
Probably worse, unless they are less likely to pull the fish up to begin with unless being kept? I doubt the hook is anywhere near as traumatic as the rest of the process.
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
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.
Same reasoning behind not giving infants anesthetics during surgery.
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.
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.
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
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.
Feeling like a fish out of water sounds much darker now.
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. Sure, in a philosophical sense it’s imposible 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”.
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?
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.
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:
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.
Let their lungs collapse?..
Yes. The g folds in front and everything shortens.
That’s why we call them gls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
