Business Toolbox: Marketing
Do fish feel pain? It depends

I love this question.

 It’s one of the most visible dividing lines between outdoors people and animal-rights activists because the only ones to know the true answer are the fish themselves. And they ain’t talking.

 Both sides say they have science on their side.

 Dr. James Rose of the University of Wyoming, who has studied animals’ reactions to painful stimuli for three decades, has concluded that fish do not have the brain system necessary to feel pain. They react to being hooked but don’t have the ability in its brain to define it as pain.

 In “Do Fish Feel Pain?” Rose wrote, “The facts about the neurological processes that generate pain make it highly unlikely that fish experience the emotional distress and suffering of pain. Thus, the struggles of a fish don’t signify suffering when the fish is seized in the talons of an osprey, when it is devoured while still alive by a Kodiak bear, or when it is caught by an angler.”

 In 2003, a study at Edinburgh University and the Roslin Institute in the United Kingdom — one that is used by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in its Fishing Hurts campaign — concluded that fish feel “emotional stress” in response to pain stimuli.

 The study was based on subjecting anethesized trout to damaging stimuli. The research team, according to PETA, concluded that fish clearly experience pain in the same way as mammals, both physically and psychologically.

 That’s enough with the science.

 My take on this has always been from a simple observation. If fish feel pain, why would they eat things that would cause them pain? Bass eat crawfish, which I’m sure probably uses its pinchers to defend itself. I’ve been pinched, and man it hurts. With so many things a bass can eat, why do they keep coming back for a meal of crawfish? Saltwater species eat urchins, spiney fish like pinfish and sting rays. They keep coming back for a meal, too. – Scott Bernharde, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, April 30, 2008P

Sorry, due to technical problems, no articles for Wednesday.

Thursday, May 1, 2008P

For more than a century, the blue crab has sustained life on this marshy sliver of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Honga River. Income from the harvest pays the mortgage, the electric bill, the tab at the grocery store, even college tuition.

But islanders fear that their way of life -- long made precarious by unpredictable weather, rising equipment costs and dwindling crab populations -- is about to be regulated out of existence.

Last week, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced it will end the season for female crabs Oct. 23, about seven weeks early. That will slash income for crabbers here at the most lucrative time -- when the female crabs are migrating along the coast of the Lower Eastern Shore to Virginia, where they spawn. The state also is imposing limits on how many bushels of females watermen can take in September and October, further cutting their income.

"The main stream of our income is this crab, and without it, we are just destroyed," said Thomas "Bubby" Powley, a crabber who also owns a crab-picking house. "There is just no way we can live with the regulations that they are suggesting."

Founded in 1667 as a farming village, Hoopers Island -- actually a skinny chain of islands so close together they are almost a peninsula -- was once covered with tobacco and wheat crops. But by the end of the Civil War, island men had taken up life on the water, first oystering and later crabbing. Island women picked crabmeat.

The biology of the Chesapeake Bay favored Hoopers -- lots of female crabs led to processing houses with names like Phillips, Hall and Ruark, families that remain here to this day. Nine of Dorchester County's 14 seafood processors are on Hoopers Island.

But the bounty that has enriched the island now imperils it. Scientists say the female crab needs to be saved to propagate the species, and females are nearly all of what islanders catch each fall. So, while the crab restrictions will affect all watermen, they will disproportionately hurt Hoopers and the lower bay.

Natural Resources Assistant Secretary Frank Dawson acknowledges as much but says the state must take action to reduce the female crab harvest by a third to revive the species. The crab population has plummeted, a drop scientists attribute both to overfishing and the bay's poor health.

"It's difficult to have the level of reduction of female harvests that we're talking about and not have certain areas more affected than others," Dawson said. "Crabs haven't been getting fixed for the better part of this decade. They just have not come back."

Watermen here disagree. Several say they had their best season in years during 2007, even though the harvest baywide was the smallest in decades. They say that, if the blue crab must be protected, the state should create a deep-water sanctuary from the northernmost part of the bay to the southern edge of Maryland's waters, spreading the pain among all crabbers.

But Dawson said few crabs are caught in the deep water. There's no data to suggest that banning deep-water crabbing would bring back the species, he said. – Baltimore Sun