We can never prove that other animals are conscious. What do we do with that?

What must it feel like to be a fish — to glide weightlessly through the sea, to draw breath from water, to be (if one is lucky) oblivious to the parched terrestrial world above?

Maybe you suspect there isn’t much to fish — and you could hardly be blamed for it. For centuries, Western natural philosophy maligned sea creatures as primitive, dim-witted, perhaps not even conscious. It’s a prejudice that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, whose scala naturae ranked fishes near the bottom of the hierarchy of existence. According to Plato, fish were characterized by “the lowest depths of ignorance.”

And so it remains today: Humans use fishes in far greater numbers than we do land animals — for food, for amusement as pets, and more — but our species shows strikingly little interest in what these experiences might be like for them. We even use fish as bywords for stupidity and poor brain function, like the proverbial goldfish mind that resets every three seconds — a myth fabricated out of thin air.

But I should speak for myself. Although I’m professionally obsessed with the ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I’ve given little thought to the massive class of animals that we call fish. I’ve hardly written a word about the hundreds of billions killed — quite brutally — by the commercial fishing and fish farming industries every year, nor much considered why it is that aquatic animals are treated as an afterthought to those who live on land.

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