Do fish feel pain?

[Jackalope]

Would it be better to say "respond to damage to the body"?

Maybe, but that's not the question the OP asked and has declined to clarify what he means.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Would it be better to say "respond to damage to the body"?

Maybe, but that's not the question the OP asked and has declined to clarify what he means.

So ignore the op. Orphaned threads are fair game.

[FlatAssembler]

I feel pain just reading this thread. Fish are lucky.

Boru

I agree with you. Birds and mammals other than humans are less lucky than humans. But fish, and most animals (that don't feel pain), are luckier than humans.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I feel pain just reading this thread. Fish are lucky.

Boru

I agree with you. Birds and mammals other than humans are less lucky than humans. But fish, and most animals (that don't feel pain), are luckier than humans.

You miss my point. If fish could read this thread, they WOULD feel pain.

And you still haven’t told us what you mean by ‘pain’, which would seem to be the basis for making any kind of argument on this topic.

Boru

[brewer]

I feel pain just reading this thread. Fish are lucky.

Boru

I agree with you. Birds and mammals other than humans are less lucky than humans. But fish, and most animals (that don't feel pain), are luckier than humans.

If you think fish are luckier you might want to find someone who will perform a lobotomy.

[Ravenshire]

I agree with you. Birds and mammals other than humans are less lucky than humans. But fish, and most animals (that don't feel pain), are luckier than humans.

If you think fish are luckier you might want to find someone who will perform a lobotomy.

Didn't he already?

[brewer]

If you think fish are luckier you might want to find someone who will perform a lobotomy.

Didn't he already?

Nature did what it could, he needs something extra.

[GUBU]

I think a much more meaningful question is "does FlatAssembler feel embarrassment?"

[Fake Messiah]

Flatty, maybe you could experiment: get two aquariums, fill both with the same species of fishes, then torture fishes in one aquarium (like beat the shit out of them every day and even pluck out their fins), and if those fishes that you tortured fear you when you come close then they can feel pain.

[Paleophyte]

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).

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.