SILENT SUFFERING: Animals killed while conscious at U.S. catfish slaughterhouse
A growing body of research rebuts the long-held view that fish, unlike mammals, do not feel or sense. The science, many experts say, indicates that fish do, in fact, feel pain.
RICH SCHAPIRO: Shortly before 7:45 a.m., the slaughterhouse workers trudged inside the nondescript building at the end of a dirt road and headed to what they called the “kill floor.” There, when no one was looking, one of them would flip on a hidden camera and record the animals writhing on a conveyor belt. The worker was an undercover investigator for an animal rights group, Animal Equality, which had conducted hundreds of such investigations around the world. But this one was among the more unusual. It involved not pigs or cows or chickens, but fish.
Over five weeks beginning in August 2020, the investigator at the facility, a catfish farm in central Mississippi, documented fish dumped onto a conveyor belt and left to suffocate when workers took breaks, according to Animal Equality. The investigator also shot video of turtles and unwanted fish abandoned in buckets without water for long stretches of time before being chopped up alive in an industrial machine, according to the group… “If one pig were killed in this manner, the slaughterhouse would be shut down,” said Sean Thomas, international director of investigations for Animal Equality…
More than 50 years ago, the U.S. installed legal guardrails to reduce the suffering of commercially slaughtered animals like pigs and cows and goats. Fish have traditionally been seen in a different light. But a growing body of research rebuts the long-held view that fish, unlike mammals, do not feel or sense. The science, many experts say, indicates that fish do, in fact, feel pain. The conclusion could have major implications for fisheries in the U.S. It also raises polarizing questions: Should people be criminally charged for abusing fish, and if so, what should the legal standard be?
Animal cruelty laws differ by state. Some are explicit about the animals covered under criminal statutes. Others are less so, leaving them open to interpretation. The laws in Mississippi do not exclude fish, legal experts said. But getting a prosecutor to crack down on a place for alleged fish abuse is another matter. Animal Equality laid out its findings in an email to the prosecutor in Yazoo County and called for a criminal investigation into the catfish farm. After a long silence, Yazoo County prosecutor John Donaldson finally wrote back. “I’m not interested in any of this,” he wrote, according to an email shared with NBC News.
Michigan State University law professor David Favre, an expert on animal cruelty laws, said he was not surprised that an animal rights group had struggled to persuade a prosecutor to pursue a criminal case against a catfish farm. “Would a prosecutor really go and present a case to a jury about fish?” Favre asked. “I don’t think that’s very likely. “But if they wanted to try it,” Favre added after reviewing the Mississippi laws, “they’d definitely have the legal basis”…
In Mississippi, two of the statutes that regulate harmful behavior toward animals include no language that excludes fish. They instead refer to “any living creature” except dogs or cats, which are covered under separate statutes. Kathy Hessler, director of the Animal Law Clinic at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., analyzed Mississippi’s animal cruelty laws in a memo for Animal Equality. “The language within the chapter is not ambiguous or unclear and therefore must be read as written to apply to fish and turtles,” she wrote…
Fish are not protected under the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, a 1958 law requiring that pigs, cows and other commercially slaughtered mammals be spared needless suffering. Catfish farms are inspected by the Agriculture Department, but the inspections focus only on whether the animals are prepared and processed in sanitary conditions. It is very rare, indeed, but prosecutors have brought criminal charges for allegations of fish abuse…
Lynne Sneddon, a biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, has been studying whether fish feel pain for more than two decades. Her research began with some basic questions. Do fish have the nervous systems to detect pain? “The answer is yes,” she said in an interview. “Is that information conveyed to the brain? It is, indeed”… “There’s lots and lots of evidence that fish are sentient beings,” Sneddon said. “Really, there’s no reason we should be treating them any differently from mammals”…
Her research has shown that fish, when under duress, stop engaging in such basic behaviors as eating. In one study, she found that fish subjected to injections of acetic acid returned to normal swimming and eating patterns after receiving painkillers. In another, fish given a painful stimulus to their lips were observed rubbing their mouths against the side of a tank, much as a human might rub a toe after stubbing it…
In 2013, the American Veterinary Medical Association published new guidelines for euthanizing animals, which referred to the research finding that fish feel pain. “The preponderance of accumulated evidence supports the position that finfish should be accorded the same considerations as terrestrial vertebrates in regard to relief from pain,” the guidelines read. SOURCE…
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