riverman wrote:

I wonder how much pain a fish feels from scaling and being cut up, if
it were decapitated first. Hmph.

lazarus wrote:
Hmm yeah it seems ignorant as well as silly. The fact that a muscle
continues to writhe after decapitation shows nothing about pain. It
shows that muscles continue to writhe (in mammels as well as fish)
after death - a phenomenon that's been noted for many centuries.

I think she meant that since cold blooded animals require less oxygen,
the blood supplied by the muscle that's left attached to the head might
keep them alive to feel the pain of being decapitated, and then they
would experience suffocation, so it's better to have them die of
suffocation before decapitating them. Personally, I'd prefer to
decapitate them before the suffocated, and try not to leave much muscle
or anything behind the head. That might cause them to suffocate faster.
But I definately wouldn't scale the body with the head attached if the
fish was alive, and I'd use the "cold-anesthetize" method.

I also heard that some people hit the fish in the head to knock it out.
I wish SOME kind of humane treatment for fish was regulated. It's
possible that fish suffer about as much as a human would under the same
conditions. But I have a feeling that even if we KNEW that for sure,
people would think it's somehow not as bad because they're just fish.
To me, the main difference is that a fish's faimily probably would
mourn for them as much as a human's family would mourn for a human, but
it's the possible physical pain that bothers me.

Wolfgang wrote:

If fish DON'T feel pain, it's difficult to see how anything done to them can
be construed as cruel; no one has any real reason to be upset by anything
done to them. If they DO, then ALL recreational angling is needlessly
cruel.

I heard the roof of a fish's mouth doesn't have enough nerves to feel
pain from a hook, but I wouldn't recreational fish anyway. I used to
fish a little as a kid, and I was the complete opposite of how I am
now. I once caught a snapper and people on the peir told me to throw it
back if I won't be eating it, but I wanted to see it swim in circles in
my bucket. And I once caught an eel and people were trying to buy it
from me so they could eat it, and they kept raising their price, but I
wanted to bring it home just to show my father. I guess I'm trying to
make up for it by saving their great grandkids.