Jonathan Balcombe - What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins

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To the anonymous trillions

When I was eight I climbed into an aluminum rowboat with the elderly director of a summer camp north of Toronto. He rowed a quarter mile out into the shallow bay, and we spent the next two hours fishing. It was a calm summer evening and the water was like glass. It was my first time in a small boat, and floating on this vast, faintly undulating expanse of dark water was exhilarating. I wondered what creatures lurked below, and this stoked my excitement whenever the sudden jerk of my primitive fishing polea stripped sapling with a line and hooksignaled that a fish had struck the bait.

I caught sixteen fish that day. Some we released. Several others, larger bass and perch, we kept for breakfast the next morning. Mr. Nelson did all the dirty work, baiting the barbed hooks with writhing earthworms, twisting the wire out of the fishs lips, plunging his knife into their skulls to kill them. His face contorted strangely as he performed these tasks, and I wondered if he was feeling revulsion or if he was merely lost in concentration.

I have some fond memories of that experience. But, as a sensitive boy with a soft spot for animals, I was disturbed by a lot of what went on in that rowboat. I worried privately about the worms. I fretted that the fish felt pain as the stubborn hook was extracted from their bony, staring faces. Maybe one of the keepers survived the knife and was dying slowly in the wire basket dangling over the side. But the kind man sitting at the bow didnt seem to think there was anything wrong, so I rationalized that it must be okay. And the taste of fresh fish at breakfast the next morning left only vague remnants of misgivings from the previous evening.

That was not my only childhood encounter with fish that raised conflicting emotions about our cold-blooded cousins place in our moral calculus. In fourth grade, I was one of a few kids recruited to move some supplies from our classroom to a neighboring room at my elementary school in Toronto. Among the items was a glass fishbowl containing a lone goldfish. The vessel was three-quarters full of water, and quite heavy. Concerned that the fish not be placed in the hands of someone who might care less than I did, I volunteered to transport the bowl to its destination, a counter next to the sink in the adjoining room.

How ironic.

I firmly held the bowl in my childs hands and methodically walked out the door, down the hall, and into the new room. As I gingerly approached the counter, the bowl slipped from my grasp and smashed on the hard floor. It was a moment of horror that played out in slow motion. Shards of glass splintered and water sloshed across the floor. I stood there stunned. Someone with more wits than I grabbed a mop and moved the glass and water to one side, then four of us began to scour the floor for the fish. A minute went by with no sign of the creature. It was like a bad dream. It seemed as if she had experienced goldfish rapture and risen up to the fishy heavens. Finally, someone found her. She had bounced behind a radiator and ended up on the inside lip, two inches above the floor and completely out of view. She was still alive, gawping meekly. She was quickly plopped into a beaker of tap water. I believe that fish survived.

Though the goldfish incident left a deep impression on me, as evidenced by my vivid recollection of it four decades later, I was not moved to a new empathy for fish. Admittedly, I never took a shine to fishing; what little enthusiasm remained after the outing with Mr. Nelson soon faded when it came time to bait and extract my own hooks. But I made no connection between the perch and bass I unceremoniously hauled up from Sturgeon Bay, or the hapless little goldfish I dropped at Edithvale Elementary School, and the anonymous fish who ended up in the Filet-O-Fish sandwiches I enjoyed on family trips to the local McDonalds. That was the late sixties, and already McDonalds was boasting over one billion served. They could as soon have been referring to fish or chickens as to customers. But like other members of my culture, I was blissfully removed from the once living, breathing creatures who ended up in my lunch.

It was not until I took an ichthyology course in the final year of my undergraduate biology degree twelve years later that I began to seriously question my relationship to animals, including fish. I was as captivated by fishes diverse anatomy and adaptations as I was disturbed by the parade of inert, once-living bodies we were given to classify using dissecting microscopes and taxonomic keys. The class made a midterm visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, where we met one of Canadas foremost ichthyologists for a private tour of the museums fish collection. At one point he unlocked and raised the lid of a large wooden case to reveal an enormous lake trout floating in an oily preservative. The fish, weighing a record 103 pounds, had been caught on Lake Athabasca in 1962. Her size and plumpness were attributed to a hormone imbalance that had rendered her sterile; energy that would normally have been spent on the profligate task of egg production was instead assigned to body mass.

I felt for that fish. Like most we encounter, she had no name and her life was a mystery. I felt like she deserved a more dignified existence than entombment in a wooden case. To me it would have been better had she been eaten, her tissues recycling back into the food chain, than to float for decades in darkness, polluted by chemicals.

Legions of books have been written about fishtheir diversity, their ecology, their fecundity, their survival strategies. And several bookshelves can be filled with books and magazines about how to catch fish. To date, however, no book has been written on behalf of fish. Im not referring to the conservationist message that decries the plight of endangered species or the overexploitation of fish stocks (have you ever noticed that the word overexploitation legitimizes exploitation, and that stocks reduces an animal to a commodity like wheat whose sole purpose is to supply humans?). My book aims to give voice to fish in a way that hasnt been possible in the past. Thanks to breakthroughs in ethology, sociobiology, neurobiology, and ecology, we can now better understand what the world looks like to fish, how they perceive, feel, and experience the world.

In researching this book I have sought to sprinkle the science with stories of peoples encounters with fishes, and I will be sharing some of these as we go along. Anecdotes carry little credibility with scientists, but they provide insight into what animals may be capable of that science has yet to explore, and they can inspire deeper reflection on the human-animal relationship.

What this book explores is a simple possibility with a profound implication. The simple possibility is that fishes are individual beings whose lives have intrinsic valuethat is, value to themselves quite apart from any utilitarian value they might have to us, for example as a source of profit, or of entertainment. The profound implication is that this would qualify them for inclusion in our circle of moral concern.