The Aquatic Algorithm

Fish welfare is a controversial and scientifically challenging area, largely because fish are an incredibly diverse, paraphyletic group that live in water and rely on senses that are fundamentally different from those of humans, making human intuition a poor tool for assessment. The central debate pits those who demand unequivocal scientific proof of sentience (the "doubters") and focus on biological functioning (health and physiology) against those who take a precautionary stance and believe conscious perception of well-being is relevant (the "believers"). To move this field forward, a compromise is proposed by the Animal Husbandry and Ethology Group (Lorenz Gygax and Edna Hillmann): assessing welfare based on what fish are motivated to achieve (their proximate goals, or 'wanting') and what satisfies those motivations ('liking'), which addresses their behavioural needs independently of the hard question of sentience. Furthermore, they explore new methods like population-level judgement bias tests as practical indicators of potential affective states, like mood, in large-scale production settings. If you want more information about this discussion on fish welfare, read the Aquaculture, Fish and Fisheries Article.

Abstract

In this viewpoint, we highlight two issues that we believe deserve more emphasize in the ongoing discussions on fish welfare. On the basis of the naturally or artificially selected proximate behavioural mechanism, an animal today may attempt to reach goals that are not necessarily equal to the functions that yielded higher fitness in the past process of evolution. These attempts lead to proximate ‘needs’ of animals. Accordingly, we can increase fish welfare by asking what goals fish are trying to reach (‘wanting’) and which results will satisfy their resulting needs (‘liking’). This can be done independently of the hard question about their subjective experiences. Because answering such questions of wanting and liking relies on highly experimental procedures, we should additionally think about approaches to assess fish welfare in practice in a way that goes beyond health aspects, too. Recently developed techniques open exciting avenues to tap into judgement biases of populations that may indicate welfare and may be applicable in large-scale fish production systems. Being aware of these two issues hopefully helps to temper the conflict between the two current extreme poles of either negating or assuming a high level of fish sentience in the discussion of fish welfare.