As an angler and marine scientist, questions such as “Do fish feel pain?” and “Do they suffer?” come up quite often. When deploying satellite tags on billfish, I regularly get asked if the insertion of the tag’s dart causes pain. And in college, I remember my professors not always agreeing on the topic of whether fish feel pain at all, or even a little bit.
Over the years, the concept of fish suffering has been brought up in regard to the morality of recreational catch-and-release fishing by governments such as Germany, when they passed the Animal Welfare Act in the late 1990s. Also banning the practice last year, Colombia declared catch-and-release sport fishing unconstitutional based on the idea that fish are “sentient beings” and “might” feel pain, but killing the fish remains legal. After a quick online search, I found that peacock bass, one of Colombia’s more popular recreational targets, has a 95 percent survival rate when caught and released in a typical recreational fishery. So why would Colombia decide to require anglers to kill these beautiful fish that more often than not survive the process?
Although the precautionary approach to fisheries management is important to ensure that we have healthy fish stocks well into the future, making a legislative ruling based on a