Fish could have emotions and consciousness

[josephpalazzo]

http://thinkpol.ca/2015/11/30/fish-could-have-emotions-and-consciousness-biologists-find/



So the next time you have tuna salad, beware...

[stromboli]

Thank you. I'll bear that in mind the next time I smack a trout's head on a rock.

[SGOS]

Finally!  A scientific study that puts the "do fish feel pain" debate to rest.

[stromboli]

I promise I'll be more sensitive about about it. I won't scream "die motherfucker!" when I bash their heads on a rock.

[SGOS]

When I was just a tad, I was with my Dad when he caught his first musky in Wisconsin.  Some musky fisherman keep a 22 pistol in their tackle box.  My dad only had a club.  It was a violent commotion, with him beating the tar out of that fish while it was slamming around in the bottom of the rowboat.  He called it self defense. 

[stromboli]

When I was just a tad, I was with my Dad when he caught his first musky in Wisconsin.  Some musky fisherman keep a 22 pistol in their tackle box.  My dad only had a club.  It was a violent commotion, with him beating the tar out of that fish while it was slamming around in the bottom of the rowboat.  He called it self defense. 

For Muskies, Gar and others, no shit. They are some badass fish. Catfish also. Used to catch Cats as a kid because Utah Lake had channel cats. I caught a lake trout, biggest fish I ever caught, that was close to 2 feet in length. It didn't die easy, but it died. 

[SGOS]

For the first 15 years of my life, family vacations always took us up to Wisconsin, where my father would fish all day long, while my sister, mother, and myself would spend the day swimming on a private sandy beach in front of a rented cabin.  Sometimes I would go out with my mother in a rowboat and fish for blue gills with these bamboo cane poles and bobbers.  My mother loved this.  She would get inordinately excited every time she caught a blue gill and she would scream like she was in some kind of trouble.  But she loved it, and couldn't wait to get her line back in the water.  Once, we went up to Ontario and rented a cabin on a small island, but I was too young to remember much about it, except from our family slide shows.  On other occasions, my father would go away with his buddies for a week at a time, usually to Canada, and do some serious fishing, well documented with exciting pictures of unshaven adult males wearing red buffalo plaid wool shirts holding huge northern pike for the camera.

I moved to Montana on my own when I was 17, but then I only caught trout.  Much better eating, but not near as exciting to me.  My father always had this dream of canoeing in the Boundary Waters canoe area between Minnesota and Ontario in the Quetico Provincial Park.  He finally bought a canoe and after a few years, we scheduled a trip to the Quetico together.  I took the train back to Chicago, where we loaded the canoe on top the car and headed north for a father/son adventure to the Boundary Waters.

My father had kind of cooled on fishing by that time, and wanted to retrace part of the route of the French Voyagers that years before had hauled their beaver pelts back to the Hudson's Bay Company by canoe through the Quetico, often all night long guiding themselves by the North Star (or so it was related to me by my father).  He was finally living a long dreamed of fantasy.  But all he wanted to do was paddle and clock miles, while I was anxious to fish, wanting to capture the thrill he used to tell me about with those wonderful fishing stories of days gone by.  I kept wanting to stop and fish, but he would say, "We can fish in a few days, but I want to get some miles in (like the French voyagers)."  OK, I'd been there before.  Once he got something in his head, it was always, "OK, but just a few more days" of whatever, and it would never happen unless someone made a major stink and took the reins away from him.  Finally, we ended up in a rather bitter argument, with some bent feelings over the issue.

But to my father's credit he acquiesced, and we made time for some fishing.  We would paddle a bit, and then take some time to cast a shoreline.  Two days went by without a bite, and I started feeling bad about having our argument.  On the third day of fishing, the fish started to bite.  We came to a small cascade that tumbled down the hill to the lake, where lake trout were laying in wait and having a feeding frenzy.  They were small for lake trout, maybe 4 or 5 pounds each, but we were catching them on every cast, and we weren't fishing deep as is often necessary for lake trout.  We were just casting red and white Dare Devil spoons.  I'm not exaggerating this.  Every cast caught a fish.  We finally ended up taking turns casting so our lines wouldn't get fouled up with each other.  We released all of them.

After we made camp that night, I went out in the canoe by myself in a near by back water loaded with standing dead snags rising out of the bay.  I thought I had snagged something on the bottom, but whatever it was had a wee bit of give to it, so I started the process of gently reeling in bit by bit, hoping I wouldn't break my line, but I was able to slowly make headway.  After a few minutes, I felt a single tug on my line, and realized I had a fish, but I kept slowly reeling it in, until all Hell broke loose.  When it was over ten minutes later, I had caught a 20 pound lake trout.  Later, I caught a lunker of a Northern Pike maybe three feet long.  This got my dad interested so he got in the canoe and we started a major fish war, releasing all of them except for the trout, which took us three days to eat.  This periodically stopping to reel in tons of fish continued for the rest of the trip.

After a couple of days, I turned to my dad and said, "Is this what the fishing was like back in your day?"  He replied, "Son, I've never seen fishing this good before."  We paddled 100 miles and made 25 portages on that trip, only seeing 4 other guys during the 10 days in the Quetico.  It was my first of many adventures, which set the tone for the rest of my life.  Some guys amass large amounts of money in a lifetime, but I measure the quality of life by adventures.  He who dies with the most adventures, wins.  Well, that's how I see it anyway.

Many years later, I discovered fishing for King Salmon while I was sailing in British Columbia, and that raised the bar for me after that.  I haven't fished for 10 years.  There's too many other adventures, I guess, and you can't do it all at once.

[Baruch]

Trout are hard to catch then they are focused on other things ...

Many years ago my parents and I were camping in the W Oregon back country ... had a wonderful small river there that wasn't too big or too fast.  We tried and tried to catch the trout we could see, but they were all moving up stream and not biting.  The closest I came was when I tried to wade across the river, it was about 5 feet deep at the middle.  I nearly stepped on something swimming on the bottom, not too murky that I couldn't see the outline ... had to have been a stupid trout ... got scared and returned to the near shore.

At that same campsite we saw a snake swim across a rivulet that was feeding the river.  And when my dad went to do his #2 under a cedar tree ... he got a surprise.  When he looked up, there was a porcupine in the tree looking down on him!  Yes, good memories are priceless.

[Unbeliever]