(March 6, 2024 at 12:41 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: Well, like I've said, fish don't have the anatomical machinery that seems to be necessary to feel pain. Sharks and sterlets don't even have nociceptors. And higher fish, while they do have nociceptors, they have little or no type-c neurofibers, which seem to be necessary for pain (Although some experts argue that, in higher fish, type-A-delta neurofibers play the same role as type-C neurofibers do in birds and mammals).
Yes. Note how they squirm when you jab a jagged piece of metal into their mouth. Now note how that response can be suppressed with a local anesthetic (Sneddon, 2019).
Quote:As well, fish don't behave as if they felt pain. A fish with a hole in its fin continues swimming normally, for example.
How loud did you shriek the last time that you got a haircut?
A similar argument was advanced for decapods so that certain individuals could feel less guilt about boiling them alive. And act as if they were vegetables.
The "thinking" was that lobsters lacked the brain structures that allow mammals and such to feel pain. Big shock there seeing as how lobsters are about as far from mammals as you can get and still be in the animal kingdom. Anybody clueful enough to notice that mammals and decapods are arranged in a completely different order (protostome vs deuterostome anatomy) might have easily guessed that there would be changes to the wiring schematics too. Of slightly less surprise was when later research showed that decapod brains have analogous structures to the ones that we use to perceive pain and all of the same behaviors.
