11a. Key, Brian (2016) Why fish do not feel pain
Consciousness means sentience which means the capacity to feel. We are not the only species that feels: Does it matter?
Reading: Key, Brian (2016) Why fish do not feel pain. Animal Sentience 3(1) (read the abstracts of some of the commentaries too)
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The author argues that fish do not feel pain because they lack specific brain structures that are involved in creating the sensation of pain. Further, the author argues that behavioural studies misrepresent the experience of fish, and animals in general, through poor operationalizations of pain through behaviours. Most notably, when fish are given a craniotomy, a pain inducing procedure in humans and other mammals, the fish do not have changes to any species-specific behaviour. One aspect of this reading that I struggled to understand was how the author could conclude that there is no specific “fish pain” because it would need to be consciously processed through specific neural architecture the fish lack. Wouldn’t the idea of “fish pain” inherently denote it is being processed in a fish specific cortical structure?
ReplyDeleteJesse, that's right, but there are many other things Key gets wrong: can you spot some more?
ReplyDelete***EVERYBODY PLEASE NOTE: I REDUCED THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF SKYWRITINGS. BUT THE READINGS ARE **ALL** RELEVANT TO AN OVERALL UNDERSTANDING OF THE COURSE. SO, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT DO A SKYWRITING ON ALL OF THEM, AT LEAST FEED EACH READING YOU DO NOT READ TO CHATGPT AND ASK IT FOR A SUMMARY, SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE READING SAID — OTHERWISE YOU WILL NOT HAVE A COMPLETE GRASP OF THE COURSE TO INTEGRATE AND INTERCONNECT FOR THE FINAL EXAM.***
Brian Key’s paper argues pretty boldly that fish “lack the necessary neurocytoarchitecture… for feeling pain,” and I found his approach both scientific and a bit unsettling. He draws a sharp distinction between nociception, which is the automatic responses to harmful stimuli, and the conscious experience of pain, which he says depends on cortical structures fish simply don’t have.
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me most was his emphasis that we often misread animal behaviour because of “anthropomorphic tendencies.” I appreciated his comparison to human spinal reflexes: just because something moves away from harm doesn’t mean it feels anything. At the same time, I found myself wondering about the ethical implications. Even if fish don’t feel pain the way humans do, Key’s argument made me reflect on how easily we project our own experiences onto other species and how complicated it is to draw lines around consciousness at all.
This is by far the worst article I've ever laid my eyes upon. The author patronizes the reader with principles of neuroscience, although he does not even understand said principles correctly. So I will correct him.
ReplyDeleteKey argues:
"Interestingly, many people, because of anthropomorphic tendencies, will instinctively endow fish with the ability to feel pain simply because they attempt to escape from noxious stimuli. To indicate that fish do not then feel like humans seems rather contradictory to this anthropomorphism."
Isn't it hypocritical to denounce anthropomorphic views of pain while mapping the experience of pain to human pain circuits? Furthermore, albeit pain perception will most likely differ between species, pain is a raw and evolutionary feeling, not a cultural or social one; I argue that "fish pain" is not merely anthropomorphism, but rather probing a shared feeling across species.
Key argues:
"If 'fish pain' existed, it would need to be consciously processed using at least the minimal neural architecture described above."
This is false. First, it is possible to feel pain while unconscious - namely, in anesthesia whithout analgesia, a patient will still feel pain. Secondly, the highly hierarchized cortical circuits of human pain structures surely cannot be the minimal structural substrate for pain perception, as our cortical structure is the most advanced one.
A𝛿 and C fibers associated with nociception have been found in the trigeminal nerve of the rainbow trout (Dunlop & Laming, 2005). However, Key argues:
"[...], as noted earlier, most of the fish nervous system circuitry is constructed using feedforward pathways that allow rapid execution of unfelt motor programs subserving survival behaviours."
Why, then, evolve the nerve fibers known to be the 1) least myelinated and 2) have the smallest diameter, i.e. the slower action potential-propagating fibers?
Finally, his comparison of the MMR vaccination case and the fish pain case is laughable.
This connects to our discussion of the hard problem, as even if we examine all the aspects of the easy problem of pain in a fish (seeing behavioural reactions, looking at brain structures etc), we still have no way of concretely knowing if/how they feel.
ReplyDeleteI, however, strongly disagree with the treatment of this issue. Key writes: accepting at “face value” that fish feel pain may seem like a harmless alternative, but it has led to inappropriate approaches to fish welfare.
I don’t understand how respecting organisms in nature could lead to outcomes besides better sustainability and relationships with natural resources. (I recently read the Braiding Sweetgrass chapter "Burning Cascade Head” and I highly recommend it).
Claiming that the dynamic activity of the cortical network defines the subjective experience of pain is reductive. The author mentions that the dorsal-posterior insular cortex correlates positively with the subjective intensity of pain, but seems to forget a crucial concept which is that “causation and correlation are not the same”. He draws causal conclusion, which we see by his use of “evoke” from pure correlation (from the passage “There are at least three principal lines of evidence supporting the cortical origins of human pain: […] (3) direct stimulation of cortical regions in this network evoke pain.”). Overall he makes many claims and shortcuts, which is outrageous as studies like this one can result in poor treatment of fish. This study contrast with the rise in awareness for marine life. We can notably think of the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), a charity focused on saving shrimp as recent studies and experiments suggest that shrimp, along with other crustaceans, likely feel pain, and are not simply reacting through reflex.
ReplyDeleteKey’s argument has several problems. Beyond the fact that he ignores fish-specific cortical areas that could support fish-like forms of pain experience—something Jesse C. pointed out—Key overlooks many other important considerations. He claims that we can’t have direct proof of conscious experience for any fish, but that is equally true for any non-human and even other humans, which is exactly the 'other-minds problem.' Demanding perfect proof only for fish is inconsistent, and when a being might feel pain, the precautionary principle says we should err on the side of caution. Key dismisses this, which critics see as ethically risky. He also disregards broader evidence that vertebrates (including birds, reptiles, mammals, fish) share key features associated with sentience/consciousness: nociceptors, centralized nervous systems, stress responses, certain behaviours, etc. By treating fish as fundamentally different from other vertebrates, Key contradicts what evolutionary continuity strongly suggests: that the biological systems supporting "feeling" and "pain" did not vanish in fish and then reappear in mammals, but are conserved across vertebrates.
ReplyDeleteIn this paper, Key argues that specific cortical structures are necessary for pain; fish that lack these structures therefore cannot feel pain…I find this logic problematic (for several reasons, but I’ll only focus on one). If we accept Key’s structure criteria as necessary, then newborn babies cannot feel pain either (babies are born with incomplete cortical structures and development to maturity takes years). Yet babies clearly show affective pain responses -they cry, show elevated stress hormones, etc (and frankly its intuitively absurd to even consider otherwise). Babies meet all of Key’s criteria except for the structural one. This is revealing that Key has confused correlation with necessity. The infant case shows that even within our own species, less developed neural tissue is capable of generating pain. And if immature cortical structures can lead to pain, Key offers no justification for why different neural architectures, such as that of the fish, cannot. In fact, his argument proves too much; in setting human neuroanatomy as the defining foundation he actually excludes his own species at various stages of life.
ReplyDelete