Fish Feel Pain

A recent article in Discovery News delves into Do Fish Feel Pain?, a book by Penn State professor Victoria Braithwaite that explores the evidence that fish do in fact feel pain the same way most other living organisms do. “We now know that fish actually are cognitively more competent than we thought before—some species of fish have very sophisticated forms of cognition,” Braithwaite said. Trillions of fish are caught and killed each year through methods such as impaling, clubbing, or forced suffocation, and yet they are mostly unprotected by animal-welfare laws. Braithwaite is one of the leading scientists studying pain in fish.