What Types of Pain?
The report went on to explain that under experimental conditions fish quickly learned to avoid pain (which they would not do if it were a neutral or negligible sensation) even to the degree of selecting the option of food deprivation over pain. In 1987 a Dutch researcher, John Verhijen, and his co-authors published a paper in New Scientist based on experiments which, they concluded, demonstrated that fish could also be fearful and learn to anticipate pain. Still others have pointed to the fact that fish, and even invertebrates, can generate opiate-like pain-dampening biochemicals (enkephalins and endorphins), in response to injuries that would unquestionably be painful to humans, as further proof of the ability of fish to experience pain. Why would the body produce pain-relieving elements if there is no pain to be relieved? There are other such studies, including one published in December 1999, by the Australian and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching (
