Kenny Torella

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Today Explained is back with Vox's Kenny Torella, who's been looking at aquaculture, which is a fancy way of saying fish farming.

Kenny, so we talked in the first half about the process.

This is not something that I had ever given a ton of thought to, but increasingly I feel very bad about that.

Is it just me?

It's not just you.

Okay.

Our colleague Marina Blatnikova recently wrote a story about the scientific debate over fish pain, and she talked about how a lot of us probably never think about fish because they're hard to empathize with, unlike, say, a cow.

No big eyes.

Exactly.

And while fish make sounds to communicate with one another, we can't hear them.

So in many ways, they're kind of alien to us.

Even animal rights activists have largely ignored fish, even though they are farmed in far higher numbers than pigs and chickens.

You know, humanity's default attitude towards fish has largely just been that they're stupid, that they have incredibly short memories, which is a myth, it turns out.

or that they're kind of these mindless automatons, though we now know that some fish species can use tools, they can be trained to perform tricks and solve problems, and they can even memorize cues or sounds for months.

All right, so what you're telling me is fish are a lot more like my beloved dog than I would have assumed.

And the thing is, I would never want to hurt my dog.

What do we know about this big question, whether fish feel pain?

It's a really big question that scientists have been poking at a lot over the last couple of decades.