Most product taxonomies will categorize them separately. Here's two examples trying to categorize tilapia.

Google Product Taxonomy:

Food, Beverages, & Tobacco > Food Items > Meat, Seafood & Eggs

Note the distinction between meat and seafood.

GPC:

Food/Beverage/Tobacco > Fish - Prepared/Processed (Frozen) > Attribute: Type of Fish = Tilapia

Whereas meat in the GPC is defined separately:

Food/Beverage/Tobacco > Meat/Poultry/Other animals - Prepared/processed> ...

Your local grocery store probably is organized the same way. Many people think of fish flesh and meat as being different things. Words are made up and all categories are artificial, whatcha gunnuh do.

Technically speaking, tomatoes and chilis are fruits, while strawberries are not fruits (they are fruit clusters - each "seed" is an individual fruit). This is such a point of contention (apparently) that there's a whole "culinary" vs. "botanical" fruit distinction made.

Logically, eggs are meat. It's a giant animal cell. Culinarily speaking, meat refers to the tissue of mammals, particularly muscle tissue from pigs and cows and other ungulates. Fish usually excluded, poultry is often excluded, and offal may be excluded as well.

It's for the same reason why we call blackberries and strawberries both fruits (even though they are not). Culinarily speaking, they're similar. Used in a similar way. Deer, beef, and pork are interchangeable in many recipes. Beef, chicken, and salmon, are not.

And “San Jose” translates into English as “Saint Joseph”, a title associated with Catholicism. So was the practice of not eating meat Fridays for much of the 20th century. In this practice, fish was not counted as a meat, just as it wasn’t in the comment you’re referring to!

The more closely you examine it, the more interesting you can make this sentence become :)

Some religions use a different system for naming different kinds of edible muscle.

GPT-4 agrees with you and I:

Q: Is common for English speakers using colloquial English to refer to fish as animals? They technically are animals, but people don't often refer to fish as animals in every day speech. Is this correct?

A: In colloquial English, people often categorize living organisms in ways that may not align perfectly with scientific classifications. For example, many people might refer to "animals" as creatures that are mammals, birds, or reptiles, but might not immediately include fish in that category during casual conversation. This is despite the fact that, scientifically speaking, fish are indeed animals.

In everyday speech, people might say things like "I saw some animals and fish on my hike," separating fish from what they casually refer to as "animals." This is similar to how people might separate "birds" or "insects" from "animals" in casual conversation, even though both birds and insects are technically animals as well.

So, while it's scientifically accurate to refer to fish as animals, colloquial usage often makes distinctions that aren't scientifically rigorous. This is a feature of everyday language, which is shaped more by cultural norms and common understanding than by scientific taxonomy.

Uh, citation needed. I don't know anyone that doesn't call fish animals.

For reference, here's the scientific definition of "animal" - which is broad enough to include insects and various microorganisms as well as humans and other mammals:

> Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. As of 2022, 2.16 million living animal species have been described — of which around 1.05 million are insects, over 85,000 are molluscs, and around 65,000 are vertebrates. It has been estimated there are around 7.77 million animal species. Animals range in length from 8.5 micrometres (0.00033 in) to 33.6 metres (110 ft).

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

(Fish are in the category of vertebrates.)

Out of curiosity, are you a Christian who observes Lent? Many of my Christian friends do not consider fish to be “meat” as that is not allowed during Lent, but fish is allowed, therefore fish != meat.

You probably rarely hear them referred to as animals because people use the word "fish" to talk about them. But they are certainly animals.

Humans are animals too for that matter

That “Jerry’s Fishing Blog” just demonstrates the problem with using google to try to support a point. It way overstates the “debate” on the subject. At least since Linnæus developed his biological taxonomy in the 1700s, fish have been considered animals.

Here’s what Linnaeus wrote around 1758 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisces_in_the_10th_edition_of_... ):

> Always inhabiting the waters; are swift in their motion and voracious in their appetites. They breathe by means of gills, which are generally united by a bony arch; swim by means of radiate fins, and are mostly covered over with cartilaginous scales. Besides the parts they have in common with other animals, they are furnished with a nictitant membrane, and most of them with a swim-bladder, by the contraction or dilatation of which, they can raise or sink themselves in their element at pleasure.

And here’s a modern take, from https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/biological/f... :

> Fish are aquatic vertebrate animals that have gills but lack limbs with digits, like fingers or toes. Recall that vertebrates are animals with internal backbones.

You have never heard of or read about fish being referred to as animals? Not even in your biology classes at school? That you haven't is extremely strange to me, I understand what people mean when they say fish aren't animals, in terms of the colloquial usage when referring to meat, but I didn't think that most people thought that fish literally weren't animals at all.

There's no debate about fish being part of the animal Kingdom.

If you've never heard anyone refer to fish as animals, you probably never took biology in grade school. I mean no offense, but literal children with single-digit ages know that fish are animals.