Phil Thomas
Welfare laws exclude the wild but it’s not just farmed fish that feel pain
IHAVE always found it intellectually idiosyncratic that statutory concerns about fish welfare have been narrowly focused on farmed fish rather than all fish, both farmed and wild.
The legislation specifically excludes anything about wild fish and even such bodies as the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), which has a tendency to adopt a broad brief, have studiously avoided engaging in wild fish issues.
There seem to be three main arguments for excluding wild fish from consideration. The first relates to ownership and control. The case is made that fishermen, including anglers, are not the ‘keepers’ of wild fish and therefore cannot be asked to behave as if they were.
This has always seemed weak reasoning because at the moment an angler or commercial fisherman pulls the fish out of the water they are in full control. At that moment they are the ‘keeper’ for all practical purposes.
The second argument relates to the pragmatic need to face the realities of life. This line of reasoning is that commercial fishermen, bravely hunting the seas to bring home fish for a hungry population, may have few practical alternatives to hauling the fish on board and getting them processed or into ice as quickly as possible.
I can understand that argument but it raises two questions. Firstly, should we be putting more research effort into improving the welfare and treatment of fish caught by commercial fishermen?
Secondly, how should we view angling? It is an economically significant and a near religious pursuit for a substantial number of citizens but is hardly essential to food supply! In a modern industrial society people choose to be anglers as a conscious lifestyle decision; catching wild fish is not an overriding need.
The third argument rests on the assertion that fish are not really sentient creatures and there are few welfare related issues to consider. If this is the case, then the idiosyncratic treatment of farmed fish becomes even more contrary.
However, in reality, there is a substantial and growing body of scientific evidence which undermines the ‘not-sentient’ argument, so it is no longer really tenable.
In 2010, Victoria Braithwaite, professor of Fisheries and Biology at Penn State University, published an excellent short monogram ‘Do Fish Feel Pain’. This presented very clear research evidence that fish are sentient creatures and that their management and handling in fisheries raises significant bio-ethical and welfare issues.
Her approach to fisheries practice was balanced and largely non-judgemental. However, she was clear on a number of specific problem areas. For example, she stated: ‘Catch and release (angling)
“Angling is a near religious pursuit for a substantial number of citizens but is supply” hardly essential to food
is an ethically difficult issue; knowing that fish feel pain and can suffer raises questions about whether it is appropriate to allow fish to be caught multiple times.’
More recently, in 2016, Jonathan Balcombe, director of Animal Sentience with the Humane Society, Washington DC, achieved a publishing success with ‘What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Under Water Cousins’.
In some ways, this book follows on from where Braithwaite finished and provides a fascinating and well researched insight into the ethology and bio-ethics of fish, as sentient aquatic animals.
Moreover, in his concluding sections, Balcombe is campaigning in approach, advocating a substantial shift in public attitudes and public policies in regard to fish bio-ethics. This includes some strong and cogent arguments in regard to commercial fisheries and also to angling.
It is easy to dismiss the significance of these publications and the research they report as being small waves in a vast sea of public consciousness. In a turbulent world there are many other problems to think about.
However, the evidence of the past three decades indicates that the continuous progress of scientific understanding of animal ethology and bio-ethics and the progressive growth in public awareness of the issues become mutually reinforcing. Over time, they progressively impact both on public attitudes and the policies of governmental regulators, often with significant legislative consequences. There is already a wide public awareness of the impacts of human activities on wildlife resources, including fish – and ‘sustainability’ is already an important statutory and market consideration in commercial fisheries management. A similar focus is yet to fully emerge in recreational fisheries management but, for example, the salmon fisheries management provisions introduced by Marine Scotland in 2016 are clear progress along that road. It is a small (and entirely logical) step for ‘sustainability’ criteria to be extended into bio-ethical areas. This has already been a feature in various forms of animal agriculture and terrestrial wildlife management. Fisheries managers and anglers should therefore begin to prepare for future developments of that type, because they are a natural progression in thinking. In many respects, fish farming is well ahead of the curve in these matters, having responded to both regulatory and market drivers of fish welfare and fish management over many years. But bio-ethical and fish welfare implications need always to be an active ongoing consideration, especially in the adoption of new technologies and improved management practices. It really is a matter of adopting the correct mindset, through which the fish farming industry constantly ensures it is alert and alive to bio-ethics as part of its forward thinking!