• Question: Do fish have feelings?

    Asked by claudiasandra to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 18 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Apparently yes! Studies have shown that fish feel pain and are capable of having complex relationships (hunting for example) with other fish.

    • Photo: Nathan Green

      Nathan Green answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Its kind of hard to know what someone/something else is thinking or feeling! How do you know if anyone else has feelings? Fish probably do have some feelings but we shouldnt give animals human characteristics like in a disney movie.

    • Photo: Sophie Holles

      Sophie Holles answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      We can say for sure that they sense things.. ie they can definitely see, hear, feel touch, feel water movements and some of them have electrical and magnetic senses! Yes they get a message sent to the brain if they get injured for example (interpreted by some people as pain). Fish also have hormones like cortisol for stress the same as we do, and we know that hormones affect their behaviour and their metabolism (like heart rate etc). Nerve impulses from senses are processed in the brain, but we still don’t know how to interpret what they ‘feel’ when their brain receives the signals, because we can’t ask them like we do when we study humans. You need cognitive ability to have a feeling (that means ability to think, something done by the brain). We are finding out more and more about the cognitive abilities of fish, they are way more clever than most people think they are! But we still can’t prove whether any animals have feelings because we can’t ask them. Even if we could ask we couldn’t relate it to our own feelings because their brains are different so their experiences will be different. Basically I think fish do have feelings, but we can’t prove it, and we can’t exactly relate to their feelings either.

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