Fish Have Feelings Too | Hacker News Reader

Fish Have Feelings Too

npr.org

52 pointshecubus59 comments

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.

It's heartening to hear your story. It's hard to come to terms with cognitive dissonance and change your behavior.

It's very very hard. I am lucky to have a wife who has been vegan for many many years to help support me.

I resolved the cognitive dissonance by actually eating dog on a trip to South Korea.

Choosing not to eat meat doesn't really resolve all the problems. Not that eating dog does. But, for example, on a recent walk through Golden Gate Park I noticed signs that referred to "dog guardians" rather than "dog owners". I found that interesting. I neither agree nor disagree with that terminology, but it just goes to show that the issue isn't a binary matter of choosing to eat or not eat animals.

I've been eating much less meat lately, for various reasons. But I tend to think that by choosing to be vegan some people are taking the easy way out--in the present sociocultural environment being vegan is our "get out of jail free card" in terms of dealing with the issue of humane treatment of animals. But without a more sophisticated and nuanced line drawing, it's a facile choice. Eating animals is only one dimension among many in regards to their humane treatment. And in some respects it's the least interesting and even the least harmful.

You're missing the point. Cognitive dissonance is only to point that people are not entirely rational.

For most people I know, they are vegetarian or vegan because of ethics, not to be more rational with their choices. If there are any other "better" choices to do by all means go ahead. People should do what they think its best, not just talk.

And if you think they are getting a "get out of jail free card", give it a try for a week and see how hard it is.

By "easier" I meant in terms of ethics, not in terms of effort. But neither did I mean to imply that it's necessarily a cop-out to go vegan, or that people aren't making a sincere and challenging choice to do so.

But consider that the poster said, more-or-less, that he couldn't even _fathom_ eating dog. It was just totally repugnant. And so to resolve his cognitive dissonance regarding his inability to differentiate eating dog meat from other meat, he decided to go vegan. In some minor but meaningful sense, that's the easy way out.

Once upon a time I couldn't fathom eating dog meat, either. My point is that people assume that the _obvious_ ethical choice is to just go meatless. But do they ever even consider the polar opposite choice? I made a choice to explore and better understand my cultural prejudices by choosing to eat dog meat. How can we ever evolve our sense of what humane treatment is until we better understand our traditional as well as contemporary relationship with animals, including our inherent biases?

If eating dog is viscerally repugnant, but eating a pig or cow is merely intellectually troubling, by going vegan you've done nothing to resolve a substantial aspect of your relationship to animals.

There are many other aspects to going vegan, and I'm not criticizing veganism per se. I'm simply pointing out that it's an _incomplete_ choice in itself. Eating dog is also incomplete--perhaps much more incomplete. But if you can't even fathom it as an option--if your cultural prejudices are so strong that you can't even fathom they're a product of your unique cultural upbringing, rather than some divine hint to go vegan--how could you ever expect to have an objective perspective about the issue?

It's a bit more complex than that - the complexity of animals is a sliding scale. I'm not trying to convince you to change your diet, but be aware that even for vegans, animals are killed on an industrial scale for their food (just fewer of them than for an omnivorous diet). Growing vegetables and grains uses all sorts of ways to kill vermin and insects. Is there a difference between killing a vole in the field, and killing a vole to put on your plate, as far as the vole is concerned? Most people would rate insects as easily being worth less than a dog, but vermin like voles or mice are mammals, and it's harder to make a clear distinction there.

It's just not possible to feed the number of humans we have without killing lots of animals, even on a vegan diet, as it requires industrialised agriculture. This being said, there are still arguments for overall minimisation and/or for more humane treatment of 'meat animals'. You will be killing fewer animals with a vegetarian/vegan diet, but there's still 'industrialised slaughter of animals' going on.

Edit: in the occasional case, industrialisation can actually help animals. For example, in the sugar industry, they used to burn off cane fields in order to burn all the vermin to death, so workers would be safe to harvest. These days with modern industrial machines, one guy sitting in a harvester doesn't need to be protected from snakes and similar, so there's no need for burn-off. If you want to minimise your animal harm footprint, investigate where your sugar comes from as well...

you are totally right. My big gripe is that humans on the whole could give a fuck.

What I do ask though is... what makes you think human diet at scale requires by its very nature, a non vegan diet?

I'm not trying to get anyone to change their diet, just point out that animals die in agriculture even when meat is not on the plate. You will still minimise animal harm by engaging in a vegan diet, if that's your moral choice, just not eliminate it.

I think the vegan side of the argument loses sight of what primary producers see when they don't acknowledge that animals are killed as a byproduct of agriculture. To a farmer, killing animals in the form of vermin is a part of the job, so it becomes more difficult to see much difference between a mouse and a cow. My personal preference would be for the discussion to be about harm minimisation rather than harm elimination, but I don't really have a strong part in this debate.

> what makes you think human diet at scale requires by its very nature, a non vegan diet?

I didn't mean a non-vegan diet, I meant that even with a pure vegan diet for everyone in the world, we would still need industrialised agriculture to support that, and that means killing vermin at scale. It would kill fewer animals, but it would still be industrial-scale slaughter.

You should join wygager and I for coffee/beer or what ever :)

Shoot me an email. I'd love to chat in person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

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.

why should I distinguish between humans and other animals?

The position industrialized farmed animals are in, is a position we put them in because of our supposed superiority.

Animals would only be extinct because we've killed them all. We manipulated life forms for our purposes. That doesn't mean that we deserve the fruits of their demise.

Are you seriously trying to use the fact that some dipshit hippie types have tried to feed their cats vegan diets as an argument for ... honestly, I'm not even sure what you're arguing for, here.

Do you actually believe it's somehow morally superior for billions of livestock animals to live in what's effectively a concentration camp, only to be slaughtered, callously and without regard for the suffering they might experience along the way, than for that artificially propagated species to go extinct?

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.

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.

Cool, my first death threat on HN.

I'm glad that you realize that the logical conclusion of your ideas is that life is a bad thing. What is wrong is your attempt to fudge your own conclusion rather than examine your incorrect assumptions.

Suffering is just the shadow cast by happiness. You can't have pleasure without pain.

Yes, humans definitely have the moral high-ground. We're much smarter, for one!

For example: animals aren't capable of the mental gymnastics required to quell their ability to feel empathy.

Yeah, I was a vegetarian for 6 years for basically the same reasons you mentioned. I "relapsed" a few years ago and feel guilty about it sometimes, still.

I can't wait for lab-grown meat[1] to overtake "the real thing" and cast factory farming in the same category of wasteful cruelty as seal clubbing or the ivory trade.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab-g...

I am fully sympathetic to your cause. I will spend lots of my personal money on lab grown meat!

I remember reading a book about Judaism (can't recall which) that strongly hinted at the fact that kosher came out of reflection about whether or not killing an animal was 'good'. In their theory, the 'soul' of the animal was in the blood, by drawing the blood you did your best to spare the 'godly' and 'loved' (my words) part before benefiting from taking the life of a being by eating his flesh. Found that pretty interesting, a rare time where I can relate with feeling and reason behind religious rituals. That said, I was eager to share that with a jewish friend who told me that this was bs, and that you eat kosher because you have to eat kosher. Weird.

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.

The way to not be off-putting is to not proselytize.

It's perfectly possible to be strictly veg*an and not be a dick. I just really wish I could convince some of my acquaintances of that.

I'm currently eating meat on the instruction of multiple of my healthcare practitioners, but I was a strict vegetarian, and part-time vegan for years before that, and I never pissed anyone off by getting in their faces about their dietary choices. I would happily have a conversation with anyone who wanted about my choices and why I'd made them (primarily ecological, secondarily ethical), but I would always explain things as being a matter of me choosing how I wanted to live my life.

My choices were never offered as normative, and although I don't think I changed any minds, I also never lost any friends.

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?

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.

A good example of how to be off-putting.

Humans generally don't eat apex predators. Herbivores and omnivores are our preferred dietary targets.

And given how much we've made our stamp on the world, the idea that we'd lose 'apex predator' status is nonsensical.

The essence of modern ethics is not to do to others what they'd do to you - it's not doing to others what you wouldn't want to be done to you.

Unfortunately, I see this kind of reasoning applied often also to relations among peoples: "in their country they wouldn't allow you to, so ..." and even "if it were for them, they'd kill us, so...". This is wrong.

Next up we'll find that in their own way we can't relate to, plants and even single cells are conscious too.

Nihilarianism is the only choice we can justify ethically.

Alternatively, what Raed667 said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11943656)...

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.

I think a comparison to slavery might be a little ambitious here. There are plenty of other things we presently do to human beings which our ancestors can be cross with us for that are probably higher on the badness scale than eating meat.

> ...probably higher on the badness scale than eating meat.

You're kinda making 'wyager's point for him.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

That's a bit tangential. My point (which I stand by) is that eating meat is almost certainly not the epoch-defining evil in the world today the way slavery was for America in the 19th century.

I've made no comment on whether we should or should not worry about it because there are umpteen worse things - just that the early 2000s aren't likely to be looked back on as the decades of the eaters of the flesh. Maybe I'm wrong...

I've been very cynical that this would be true. I really hope it is, and until now, I wasn't sure other people felt the same way I did about it. Thanks for posting this. I'd love to buy you a beer.

> I'd love to buy you a beer.

You'll hear no objection from me!

very seriously: contact me :) I'll buy beers, or coffee, or what ever, but I'd love to chat.

> tank grown meat

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

The meat from old animals does not taste good.

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...

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.

and you have to wait (read feed, shelter, pay) twice as long at least

You're probably joking, but cattle would live 20-25 years "naturally," as opposed to 12-18 months if slaughtered. That's a lot more grain and methane.

If we control their every move, is there even such a thing as a natural cause?

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.

Did you know cows can have best friends?

They also wouldn't exist as a species if they weren't tasty to humans.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a difficult line to place, for instance is pain avoidance plus memory enough? If I imagine a fish thinking "I can't do that again" that certainly looks like sentience, but the resulting behavior (avoidance) can occur without sentience, it seems.

Is something like that been demonstrated in other animals?

Not that I'm aware of.

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?

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

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