The surprisingly profound debate over whether fish feel pain

Do fish feel? What must it feel like to be a fish — to glide weightlessly through the sea, to draw breath from water, to be (if one is lucky) oblivious to the parched terrestrial world above?  Maybe you suspect there isn’t much to fish — and you could hardly be blamed for it. For centuries, Western natural philosophy maligned sea creatures as primitive, dim-witted, perhaps not even conscious. It’s a prejudice that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, whose scala naturae ranked fishes near the bottom of the hierarchy of existence. According to Plato, fish were characterized by “the