NPR Interview - Jonathan Balcombe

21st June 201618th November 2016

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Fishes Have Feelings Too: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins:

Interview: Heard on Fresh Air – June 20, 201612:26 PM ET

Website: npr – The Salt “What’s On Your Plate”

When you think about fish, it’s probably at dinnertime. Author Jonathan Balcombe, on the other hand, spends a lot of time pondering the emotional lives of fish.

Balcombe, who serves as the director of animal sentience for the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that humans are closer to understanding fish than ever before.

“Thanks to the breakthroughs in ethology, sociobiology, neurobiology and ecology, we can now better understand what the world looks like to fish,” Balcombe says.

Click to buy the book

In his new book, What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins, Balcombe presents evidence that fish have a conscious awareness — or “sentience” — that allows them to experience pain, recognize individual humans and have memory.

He argues that humans should consider the moral implications of how we catch and farm fish.

To read full article and listen to the interview online, please click here.

Misstatements about Jonathan published in new book

UPDATE: the publisher has agreed to replace the erroneous passage with the following sentence: "Fish authority Jonathan Balcombe views the morality of fish-eating as a serious matter, and he abstains from eating animals, fish included." Jonathan's book "What a Fish Knows" is now cited in Nussbaum's book and included in the index.

Several erroneous statements about me appear in a new book by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum titled Justice For Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (Simon & Schuster, 2022). For the record, and contrary to statements mistakenly attributed to me, I do not eat fish (since making the shift to a vegan lifestyle in 1989), I view the morality of catching and eating fish as a highly serious matter, and I do not regard any fisheries as being “humane.”

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