A Kettle of Fish: A Review of the Scientific Literature for Evidence of Fish Sentience

Lambert, Helen; Cornish, Amelia; Elwin, Angie; D’Cruze, Neil

doi:10.3390/ani12091182

Cited by 18 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…There has been much debate regarding whether fish are sentient-i.e., capable of experiencing feelings of pleasure or suffering-primarily due to differences in neural anatomy that may or may not be sufficient for conscious experience (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9). However, evidence of their complex perception, cognition, learning, and behavioral responses, has led many to conclude they are sentient (10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)) and thus have a welfare that can be harmed by poor housing or husbandry practices. Precautionary reasoning suggests that this evidence should still be taken as sufficient for treating animals as sentient, to avoid causing inadvertent harm, even if certainty is lacking (17).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture

Browning

2023

Front. Vet. Sci.

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While global aquaculture is rapidly expanding, there remains little attention given to the assessment of animal welfare within aquacultural systems. It is crucial that animal welfare concerns are central in the development and implementation of aquaculture as if they are not prioritized early on, it becomes much more difficult to adapt in future. To this end, it is important to ensure the availability of high-quality welfare assessment schemes to evaluate the welfare of animals in aquaculture and promote and maintain high welfare standards. This paper will first discuss some of the current certification and assessment frameworks, highlighting the primary limitations that need to be addressed, before going on to describe the recommendations for a best-practice welfare assessment process for aquaculture; with the hope that these considerations can be taken on board and used to help improve welfare assessment for aquaculture and, ultimately, to ensure animals used in aquaculture have a higher level of welfare. Any aquacultural system should be assessed according to a suitable framework in order to be considered adequate for the welfare of the animals it contains, and thus to maintain social license to operate.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture

Browning

2023

Front. Vet. Sci.

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“…hippocampus, amygdala (Vargas, Lopez & Portavell, 2012; Montiel & Aboitiz, 2018; Lemaire et al ., 2021)]. Accordingly, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have all been described as being able to display emotion‐like states (Papini, Penagos‐Corzo & Pérez‐Acosta, 2019; Lambert, Carder & D'Cruze, 2019; Lambert, Elwin & D'Cruze, 2022 b ; Lambert et al ., 2022 a ). The high interconnectivity between subcortical and cortical structures in birds (Stacho et al ., 2020) might even suggest a certain level of consciousness in this taxon.…”

Section: The Physiology Of Welfarementioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing wild animal welfare: a physiological perspective

Beaulieu

2023

Biological Reviews

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Affective states, such as emotions, are presumably widespread across the animal kingdom because of the adaptive advantages they are supposed to confer. However, the study of the affective states of animals has thus far been largely restricted to enhancing the welfare of animals managed by humans in non‐natural contexts. Given the diversity of wild animals and the variable conditions they can experience, extending studies on animal affective states to the natural conditions that most animals experience will allow us to broaden and deepen our general understanding of animal welfare. Yet, this same diversity makes examining animal welfare in the wild highly challenging. There is therefore a need for unifying theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that can guide researchers keen to engage in this promising research area. The aim of this article is to help advance this important research area by highlighting the central relationship between physiology and animal welfare and rectify its apparent oversight, as revealed by the current scientific literature on wild animals. Moreover, this article emphasises the advantages of including physiological markers to assess animal welfare in the wild (e.g. objectivity, comparability, condition range, temporality), as well as their concomitant limitations (e.g. only access to peripheral physiological markers with complex relationships with affective states). Best‐practice recommendations (e.g. replication and multifactorial approaches) are also provided to allow physiological markers to be used most effectively and appropriately when assessing the welfare of animals in their natural habitat. This review seeks to provide the foundation for a new and distinct research area with a vast theoretical and applied potential: wild animal welfare physiology.

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“…National definitions of welfare vary (ranging from the five freedoms 30 to dignity-or well-being-focused approaches 31 ). While fish are treated as sentient by law 29 , and despite key initiatives 28,[32][33][34][35][36][37] ), some sources still express a need for debate on the matter 27,32,38 . Knowledge on fishes´ emotions and behaviour changes is available on some species 8,28,39,40 , but their subjective pain perception is sometimes discussed controversially 32,41 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While fish are treated as sentient by law 29 , and despite key initiatives 28,[32][33][34][35][36][37] ), some sources still express a need for debate on the matter 27,32,38 . Knowledge on fishes´ emotions and behaviour changes is available on some species 8,28,39,40 , but their subjective pain perception is sometimes discussed controversially 32,41 . Consequently, while the literature does discuss potential signs of distress in fish, evaluation tools for validated clinical and behavioural indicators of wellbeing are hard to come by for fish other than zebrafish [42][43][44] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EU regulations, for example, contain no notion of welfare (29). The lack of definitions is particularly striking for fish, which are treated as sentient by law (29) while other sources express a need for debate on the matter (30,25,31). Despite key initiatives (32-36, 28, 31), a dearth of high-quality approaches towards fish welfare (28), and an according lack of directives regarding experimental fish in national legislations, pose a challenge for refinement in fish research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An adaptable, user-friendly score sheet to monitor welfare in experimental fish

Flueck-Giraud,

Schmidt-Posthaus,

Bergadano

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Fish are increasingly used as experimental animals in a wide range of research fields. As of 2022, a quarter of all experimental animals used in Europe are fish, with an upward trend. At the same time, less than 20% of these are zebrafish. At the same time, welfare assessments for experimental fish are in their infancy compared to rodents. This can be attributed to the diversity of species used, the relative recency of fish as go-to model for research, and challenges to assess welfare and pain in non-vocal underwater species. The lack of assessment guidelines and easy-to-use tools is a challenge for researchers (particularly, for newcomers to the field of fish), for ethics committees, and prevents the rigorous implementation of the 3Rs (particularly, refinement). Here, we present an adaptable, user-friendly scoring tool for fish. The parameters contained in the tool are based on a literature review, have been validated by expert interviews, and weighted by a fish pathologist. The tool allows to score individuals as well as groups and provides a visualization of trends. We provide the associated literature and give detailed examples and instructions on the adaptation and use of the scoring tool. We hope that this tool to score fish welfare will empower researchers to include welfare assessment in their routines, foster discussions on fish welfare parameters among scientists, facilitate interactions with ethics committees, and most importantly, enable continuous refinement of fish experiments.

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A Kettle of Fish: A Review of the Scientific Literature for Evidence of Fish Sentience

Cited by 18 publications

References 70 publications

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture

Capturing wild animal welfare: a physiological perspective

An adaptable, user-friendly score sheet to monitor welfare in experimental fish

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