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The American Veterinary Medical Association accepts that fish feel pain: "Evidence supports the position that finfish should be accorded the same considerations as terrestrial vertebrates in regard to relief from pain."

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in Britain, commissioned in 1980 an independent panel of experts. It said: "It is only reasonable for mankind to behave on the assumption that all vertebrates are capable of suffering to some degree or another." RSPCA Australia now confirms that: "Scientific evidence that fish are sentient animals capable of experiencing pain and suffering has been building for some years. It has now reached a point where the sentience of fish is acknowledged and recognised by leading scientists across the world."

The European Union Panel on Animal Health and Welfare European Food Safety Authority asserts that: "Different species of fish have evolved highly sophisticated sensory organs to survive in changing and varied environmental conditions. There is scientific evidence to support the assumption that some fish species have brain structures potentially capable of experiencing pain and fear. The balance of evidence indicates that some fish species have the capacity to experience pain."

The Farm Animal Welfare Committee 2014's report, Opinion on the Welfare of Farmed Fish, concluded that: "Fish are able to detect and respond to noxious stimuli, and FAWC supports the increasing scientific consensus that they experience pain." Farm Animal Welfare Committee, Opinion on the Welfare, of Farmed Fish, February 2014.

Dr Lynne Sneddon, with her colleagues, Braithwaite, Gentle, were the first to discover nociceptors in fish. She has stated that: "Fish... demonstrate pain-related changes in physiology and behaviour that are reduced by painkillers; that they exhibit higher brain activity when painfully stimulated."

Professor Victoria Braithwaite, in her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, wrote that, "The evidence we have to support sentience and pain perception in fish is as good as anything we have for birds and mammals. Fish, like birds and mammals, have a capacity for self-awareness."

Donald Broom, Professor of Animal Welfare, Cambridge University, England, maintains that: "Almost all of the characteristics of the mammalian pain system are also described for fish. Emotions, feelings and learning from these are controlled in the fish brain in areas anatomically different but functionally very similar to those in mammals. The evidence of pain and fear system function in fish is so similar to that in humans and other mammals that it is logical to conclude that fish feel fear and pain. Fish are sentient beings."

The issue has also been followed in the press.