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1. What a fish knows : the inner lives of our underwater cousins LCCN 2015048629 Type of material Book Personal name Balcombe, Jonathan P. Main title What a fish knows : the inner lives of our underwater cousins / Jonathan Balcombe. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016. Description viii, 288 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm ISBN 9780374288211 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER QL639.3 .B35 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE https://lccn.loc.gov/2009030770 Balcombe, Jonathan P. Second nature : the inner lives of animals / Jonathan Balcombe ; foreword by J.M. Coetzee. 1st ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xiv, 242 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. QL791 .B26 2010 ISBN: 97802306136210230613624

• Jonathan Balcombe Home Page - http://jonathan-balcombe.com/

  About Jonathan
  Scientist:
  Jonathan & GoatJonathan Balcombe was born in England, raised in New Zealand and Canada, and has lived in the United States since 1987.

  He has three biology degrees, including a PhD in ethology (the study of animal behavior) from the University of Tennessee, where he studied communication in bats. He has published over 50 scientific papers on animal behavior and animal protection.

  Formerly Department Chair for Animal Studies with the Humane Society University, and Senior Research Scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Jonathan is currently Director of Animal Sentience with the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, in Washington, DC.

  In his spare time Jonathan enjoys biking, baking, birdwatching, piano, painting, and trying to understand the squirrels on his deck.

  Author:

  What A Fish Knows:

  Click to buy the book on Amazon.com
  Balcombe’s eagerly anticipated and most recently published book is What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of our Underwater Cousins, from Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water

  Click to buy the book on Amazon.co.uk
  Click to buy the book on Amazon.co.uk
  In What a Fish Knows Jonathan addresses these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes.

  What A Fish Knows ~ The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins was published in hardback on 7th June 2016.

  It is now also available in paperback.

  (Please click on image for more information or to purchase.)

  He Is The Author Of Four Previous Books:

  The Exultant Ark:
  A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure
  Published By: University of California Press, 2011

  The Exultant Ark Book Cover - SmallNature documentaries often depict animal life as a grim struggle for survival, but this visually stunning book opens our eyes to a different, more scientifically up-to-date way of looking at the animal kingdom.

  In more than one hundred thirty striking images, The Exultant Ark celebrates the full range of animal experience with dramatic portraits of animal pleasure ranging from the charismatic and familiar to the obscure and bizarre.

  (Please Click here or on image for more information or to purchase.)

  Second Nature:
  The Inner Lives of Animals
  Published By: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

  Second Nature Book CoverFor centuries we believed that humans were the only ones that mattered. The idea that animals had feelings was either dismissed or considered heresy.

  Today, that’s all changing. New scientific studies of animal behavior reveal perceptions, intelligences, awareness and social skills that would have been deemed fantasy a generation ago. The implications make our troubled relationship to animals one of the most pressing moral issues of our time.

  Jonathan Balcombe, animal behaviorist and author of the critically acclaimed Pleasurable Kingdom, draws on the latest research, observational studies and personal anecdotes to reveal the full gamut of animal experience―from emotions, to problem solving, to moral judgment.

  Balcombe challenges the widely held idea that nature is red in tooth and claw, highlighting animal traits we have disregarded until now: their nuanced understanding of social dynamics, their consideration for others, and their strong tendency to avoid violent conflict.

  (Please Click here or on image for more information or to purchase.)

  Pleasurable Kingdom:
  Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
  Published By: Macmillan, 2006

  Pleasurable Kingdom Book CoverThe recognition of animal pain and stress, once controversial, is now acknowledged by legislation in many countries, but there is no formal recognition of animals’ ability to feel pleasure. Pleasurable Kingdom is the first book for lay-readers to present new evidence that animals – like humans – enjoy themselves.

  It debunks the popular perception that life for most is a continuous, grim struggle for survival and the avoidance of pain. Instead it suggests that creatures from birds to baboons feel good thanks to play, sex, touch, food, anticipation, comfort, aesthetics, and more.

  Combining rigorous evidence, elegant argument and amusing anecdotes, leading animal behavior researcher Jonathan Balcombe proposes that the possibility of positive feelings in creatures other than humans has important ethical ramifications for both science and society.

  (Please Click here or on image for more information or to purchase.)

  The Use of Animals in Higher Education:
  Problems, Alternatives, and Recommendations
  Published By: Humane Society Press, 2000

  The Use Of Animals In Higher Education Book CoverThe aim of this monograph is to present a comprehensive examination of the issue of animal use in education from an ethical and humane perspective. The book seeks to challenge existing notions pertaining to animals in education by drawing widely from the published literature.

  It covers animal use in middle and high school, in college and graduate education, and in advanced training in medical and veterinary school. The emphasis, however, is on those grades in which animal use is greatest: the secondary and undergraduate levels.

  The uses of animals in education range from benign observation of creatures in their natural habitats, to dissection of dead animals, to highly invasive procedures carried out on living animals.

  (For more information, or to purchase, please click here.)

  Speaker:

  A popular speaker, Jonathan has given invited presentations on six continents.

  Check the Forthcoming Events Page on this website often to see if and when he will be coming to a place near you.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Balcombe

  Jonathan Balcombe
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jonathan Balcombe
  Born February 28, 1959 (age 57)
  Hornchurch, England[1]
  Occupation Ethology, Author
  Website
  jonathanbalcombe.com
  Jonathan Balcombe (born 28 February 1959) is an ethologist and author. He currently serves as Director of Animal Sentience with the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, and Department Chair for Animal Studies with Humane Society University,[2] in Washington, DC.[3] He lectures internationally on animal behavior and the human-animal relationship. He is Associate Editor of the journal Animal Sentience.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Writing
  4 Advocacy
  5 Bibliography
  6 See also
  7 References
  8 External links
  Early life and education[edit]
  Balcombe was born in Hornchurch, England.[1] He grew up in New Zealand and Canada before settling in the United States in 1987.[4]

  Balcombe earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology in 1983 from York University in Toronto, then a Master of Science in biology from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1987. In 1991, he completed a Ph.D in ethology (animal behavior) at the University of Tennessee,[3] where he studied mother-pup vocal communication in the Mexican free-tailed bat.[4][5]

  Career[edit]
  Balcombe has worked for several animal protection organizations, including The Humane Society of the United States, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He also worked as a research coordinator and grant writer for Immersion Medical, a for-profit company that makes virtual reality training simulators for minimally-invasive surgery.[6]

  In 2009, Balcombe was hired to teach a course in animal behavior for Humane Society University. Two years later, he assumed the role of Department Chair for Animal Studies. He developed and taught a course in Animal Sentience, and commissioned the development of courses in Evolution, Food Choice and Animal Protection, and Gender and Animals.

  Writing[edit]
  Balcombe's first book, The Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems, Alternatives, and Recommendations, was published by Humane Society Press in 2000. His trade book, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, was released by Macmillan in 2006. The book details Balcombe's positions on the sentience of animals, and the existence of pleasure seeking behavior, in contrast with the behavioralist mainstream, which rejects anthropomorphism of animals.[7] Deutschlandradio called the book a "convincing and a fun read."[8]

  In 2010, Balcombe published Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, in which he surveys recent scientific discoveries about animal cognition, emotion, and virtue, and aims to "protest against what he sees as an unbroken tradition of human cruelty and indifference."[9]

  The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure was released in 2011 by the University of California Press. Using images of contented animals in their natural environment, Balcombe "proves that animals aren’t always engaged in a battle for survival but will frequently do things for nothing more than the feeling of satisfaction."[10] Balcombe disputes the mainstream scientific community's belief that the animal kingdom is an unforgiving struggle for survival. The book briefly broke into the top 100 on Amazon.com following favorable reviews in The New York Times and the New York Post.[11][12]

  Balcombe's 2016 book, "What A Fish Knows," combines science and story-telling to examine the inner lives of the world's most diverse group of vertebrates.[13] "What A Fish Knows" has a release date of June 7, 2016, from Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Balcombe has published over 50 scholarly articles and book chapters on various topics, including animal behavior, animal research, animal dissection, medical simulation, and veganism.[4] His essay titled "After Meat" appears in the 2016 book "Impact of Meat Consumption on Health and Environmental Sustainability," edited by Dora Marinova and Talia Raphaely.

  Advocacy[edit]
  Balcombe uses a variety of platforms to advocate for a sea-change in the human-animal relationship. In addition to his books and journal papers, he is a regular speaker at conferences, campuses, public schools and other venues. He is interviewed often in the media, and he has written blogs for Psychology Today, One Green Planet, Secretary of Innovation, and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He is a manuscript reviewer for scholarly journals such as Animal Behaviour, the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

  Balcombe expressed his views on the use of battery hens in industrial agriculture during a New Zealand conference. Balcombe stated that our moral obligation to the hens is greater due to their ability to suffer, saying "it's not about how their intelligence compares to ours, it's about how much they can feel pain, suffering, joy and pleasure."[14]

  Balcombe commented on a Tufts University report about the decline of vivisection. He maintains that reliable tests require better care for the animals involved.[15] He referenced a 1990 study on lab mice that revealed that inconsistencies in test results can arise based on the stress level of each rat.[16]

  Balcombe also has served as an expert witness for undercover investigations by several organizations, most notably by the organization Mercy for Animals documenting cruelty to pigs, cattle, turkeys, and fish. In his 2011 response to an exposé by the animal protection organization Mercy for Animals of animal abuse on a pig farm, Balcombe described the farm's conditions as "an unremitting hell on earth," adding that "these intelligent animals endure awful physical and psychological suffering."[17][18]

  Bibliography[edit]
  Books
  The Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems, Alternatives, and Recommendations (Humane Society Press, 2000) ISBN 978-0965894210
  Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (Macmillan, 2006) ISBN 978-1403986023
  Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (Macmillan, 2010) ISBN 978-0230107816
  The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure (University of California Press, 2011) ISBN 978-0520260245
  What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) ISBN 978-0374288211
  Articles/chapters
  "A Biologist’s Journey to Veg" in Michael Lanfield The Interconnectedness of Life: We Are Interconnected. We Are Interconnected Films, 2015.

• SmallAnimalTalk.com - http://www.smallanimaltalk.com/2016/06/what-fish-knows-interview-with-jonathan.html

  QUOTED: "I wanted to enlighten people to the remarkably rich lives fishes have. Scientific studies of fish behavior have advanced a great deal in recent years, showing that fishes are consciously aware. ... But only occasionally does any of this information emerge from scholarly journals and reach the public eye. I wrote What a Fish Knows to make what we know of the lives of fishes widely available to humanity."

  Wednesday, June 8, 2016
  What a Fish Knows: Interview with Jonathan Balcombe

  Dr Jonathan Balcombe. Image by Amie Chou.
  Dr Jonathan Balcombe is an ethologist, academic, editor of the journal Animal Sentience and author of a number of books including What a Fish Knows. I came across his work when studying fish welfare, an area of research that has become huge over the past decade. Those who cohabit with fish, and spend a decent amount of time observing them, appear to need no convincing that fish are thinking, feeling creatures. This seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Dr Balcombe took some time out to chat to us about “the most exploited group of vertebrates on Earth.”

  For those who don't know, what does an ethologist do?

  An ethologist specializes in the study of animal behavior, which is called ethology.

  How did you come to devote the last four years exploring the science on the inner lives of fishes?

  Two main factors drove my decision to focus on fishes. First, I wanted to enlighten people to the remarkably rich lives fishes have. Scientific studies of fish behavior have advanced a great deal in recent years, showing that fishes are consciously aware, they have thoughts and emotions, personalities and preferences, social lives and sex lives. But only occasionally does any of this information emerge from scholarly journals and reach the public eye. I wrote What a Fish Knows to make what we know of the lives of fishes widely available to humanity.

  Second, fishes are collectively the most exploited group of vertebrates on Earth, and their habitats are beleaguered by human activities. We kill between 150 billion and two trillion fishes each year. Most die in horribly inhumane ways such as suffocation, crushing, or bleeding. I hope that by coming to understand fishes better, many people will change their relationship to fishes from one of complicity in their exploitation to one of respect and protection.

  One of the common misconceptions about fish is that they have a three second memory (at least goldfish). How do we know fish are sentient creatures that have memories and can learn?

  Careful studies on fishes of various types have shown that they feel pain and distress, and that they will actively seek to relieve it. The myth of the 3-second fish memory has been repeatedly debunked. Fishes recognize other individuals over the course of their lives, and some live a century or more. They learn to navigate through familiar habitats, including migration routes that may span continents. They watch others and adjust their behavior according to their awareness of their own social standing relative to another. They also learn by observation, including evidence that they can take the perspective of another—an advanced cognitive skill known only from a few animals.

  There are others who argue that despite a huge increase in studies claiming to prove or support fish sentience that fish cannot feel pain. For example, some authors argue that fish have fewer nociceptors than humans who are born with a congenital inability to experience pain. What is your view on this?

  In light of existing evidence, I consider arguments against fish sentience to be not just scientifically dubious, but selfish and mean-spirited. As full members of the vertebrate clan, fishes are anatomically and physiologically equipped to feel pain, and they respond to presumptively painful stimuli as we may expect from a pain-feeling organism: they may stop eating, hide, flee, avoid hooks, seek out pain relief, or become distracted enough to behave maladaptively. In a study of zebrafishes, individuals who had been subjected to an injection of acid began to swim in a barren chamber of their tank that they normally avoided—but only when that chamber contained a painkiller solution. Other zebrafishes injected with a less painful saline solution ignored the painkiller, choosing instead to remain in an enriched/preferred area of the tank with vegetation and objects.

  You've said that you no longer consume fish. What are the implications of this scientific knowledge about fish feelings?

  We can choose not to eat fishes because most of us (exceptions might be coastal communities whose lives depend directly on catching fish sustainably) can lead perfectly healthy and happy lives without contributing to the misery and suffering inflicted by catching and killing them. With the sorry state of affairs concerning fishes and their habitats—cruel capture methods; wasteful bycatch; dramatic population declines; chemical, plastic and noise pollution; ocean acidification; and coral bleaching—I hope more people will make the decision to cease or at least reduce their consumption of fishes.

  Thank you Dr Balcombe. What a Fish Knows is available through MacMillan.

• One Kind - http://onekind.scot/onekindblog/article/jonathan_balcombe_interview_the_exultant_ark

  QUOTED: "Animals are graceful and beautiful to behold, and pleasure is a buoyant and joyous subject. So I think animal pleasure makes a winning combination! When they see this book, I believe others will agree."
  "One of the greatest rewards for me as a writer is hearing from readers who are moved to improve their relationship to animals. I hope The Exultant Ark inspires more to do this."

  OneKind interviews Jonathan Balcombe on The Exultant Ark
  's avatar

  03 June 2011
  speech bubble Comments (2)
  Jonathan Balcombe is an academic and also a successful author of a number of popular books about animals emotions: specifically animals' pleasure.

  Jonathan Balcombe and a cow

  To coincide with the release of his book, The Exultant Ark: A pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure, Jonathan kindly agreed to a short interview with OneKind.

  Why do you believe that animals other than humans are sentient and can experience emotions?

  Two main reasons. First, animals share with us a common evolutionary history. We know that we (humans) are sentient. It is therefore a very strong inference that other animals are also sentient. Second, animals behave as sentient beings. When I accidentally step on my cat's paw in the kitchen, she screeches and runs away. An hour later, when take her brush and thump it on the carpet, she comes running and flops onto her side. She shows every indication that she loves the brushing I give her (you can watch her coming to be brushed on a video titled “cat pleasure” I posted on YouTube). It doesn't take a scientist to recognize these expressions of pain and pleasure in an animal. Emotions evolved because they are useful, they are adaptive.

  Why do you feel there is often reluctance to attribute emotions to animals? Is this changing?

  Again, two main reasons. First, emotions are private, and scientists especially are very reluctant to ascribe something to an animal that cannot be absolutely proven. For that reason scientists actively avoided questions of animal minds and feelings for most of the 20th Century. Second, if we acknowledge animal sentience and emotions, we have to face some uncomfortable moral questions about our relationship to animals. Currently, the way animals are treated in the production of meat and dairy products, fur, in research laboratories, and in a variety of other human activities would be totally unacceptable if we treated other humans that way. And when we finally realize that animals feel pain just as acutely as we do, it will dawn on us that we must stop subjecting them to these cruelties.

  Why do you think scientists have previously focussed on investigating negative emotions such as pain in animals instead of positive ones such as pleasure? Is this changing?

  Pain is a more urgent issue; avoiding pain is more important than promoting pleasure. Also, pain is more easily recognized in an animal than is pleasure. Pleasure is still grossly neglected as a subject of scholarly study, in humans as well as animals. Today there are at least 23 scholarly journals dedicated to the study of pain, but there are none about pleasure. There are only a handful of scientists who have devoted any attention positive experiences in animals, but it is gradually gaining ground. I'm hopeful that through my writings—especially my books The Exultant Ark and Pleasurable Kingdom—science and society will eventually catch on and start paying more attention to this important field.

  If animals can experience positive emotions why is this important?

  Pleasure had important moral implications. An individual who can experience pleasure has a life worth living. He has interests. Her life has intrinsic value. It also follows that death is harmful because it deprives the victim of future pleasures. The reason, I think, that murder is such a heinous crime is that it deprives someone the opportunity to enjoy the good things in life.

  What inspired you to produce your book The Exultant Ark?

  Animals are graceful and beautiful to behold, and pleasure is a buoyant and joyous subject. So I think animal pleasure makes a winning combination! When they see this book, I believe others will agree.

  What do you hope The Exultant Ark will achieve?

  One of the greatest rewards for me as a writer is hearing from readers who are moved to improve their relationship to animals. I hope The Exultant Ark inspires more to do this.

  Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of our relationships with other animals?

  Optimistic. It takes a lot of persistent effort to change societal norms. But the tide is turning for animals. Society has shown the capacity for enormous social change to the good, witness the passing of colonialism, the end of the African slave trade, and suffrage for women. The next great social movement is the animal movement. Informed by science and driven by ethics, society cannot sustain its denial that animals matter.

  If people want to help animals, what advice would you give them?

  There are of course many ways to help animals, but the most immediate positive impact an individual can make for animals is to stop eating them. Going vegetarian does a world of good for animals, the planet, and your health. Going vegan is the Holy Grail of personal activism for animals.

  Any other comments?

  As a vegan myself, I don't expect to live much beyond 150 or so, which means I won't be accountable for this prediction: humankind will someday look back on the 21st Century as the Century of the Animals.

  OneKind is grateful to Jonathan for taking the time to answer our questions. I hope you found his opinions and insights interesting and informative.

Jonathan Balcombe
Born: February 28, 1959 in Hornchurch, United Kingdom
Other Names : Balcombe, Jonathan Peter; Balcombe, Jonathan P.
Nationality: British
Occupation: Animal scientist
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Sept. 1, 2011

Table of Contents

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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born in England; immigrated to the United States, 1987. Education: York University, B.S., 1983; Carleton University, M.S., 1987; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Ph.D., 1991. Avocational Interests: Birdwatching, nature, biking, watercolor painting, piano, vegan cooking. Addresses: Office: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 5100 Wisconsin Ave. N.W., Ste. 400, Washington, DC 20016.

CAREER:
Biologist, writer. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Rockville, MD, researcher, 1991-93; Humane Society of the United States, Gaithersburg, MD, associate director for Education, 1993-2000; Immersion Medical, Gaithersburg, research coordinator, 2001-03; Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, DC, senior research scientist, 2002--.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

The Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems, Alternatives, & Recommendations, Humane Society Press (Washington, DC), 2000.
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, Macmillan (New York, NY), 2006.
The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA),2011.
Contributor to works by others, including Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, edited by M. Bekoff and C. Meaney, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1998; A Primer on Animal Rights, edited by K. Stallwood, Lantern (New York, NY), 2002; From Guinea Pig to Computer Mouse, 2nd edition, edited by N. Jukes and M. Chiuia, InterNICHE (Leicester, England), 2003; and Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, edited by M. Bekoff, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Evolutionary Ecology, Canadian Field-Naturalist, Animal Behaviour, American Biology Teacher, Society & Animals, Laboratory Animals, British Medical Journal, Contemporary Topics in Laboratory Animal Science, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, Animals's Agenda, Alternatives in Veterinary Medical Education, AV, HSUS News, and Good Medicine. Author of the column "Beyond Animal Research" for the Web site of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and a blog for FirstScience.com.

Sidelights

Jonathan Balcombe is an animal behavior researcher who writes about his specialty for both academic and general readers. In his presentations in countries worldwide, he shares his views on alternatives to using animals in research and education.

Balcombe is also the author of books, including Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, in which he studies the scientific literature pertaining to the positive feelings experienced by animals, a subject often left undiscussed within the scientific community that relies primarily on observable behavior. He first defines pleasure and comments on its importance to the study of animals, then addresses various areas of pleasure, including food, touch, play, love, and sex. He notes that pleasure may contribute to natural selection, which is a reason why it is crucial to the survival of animals.

Commenting in BioScience, Marian Stamp Dawkins wrote: "It is a biologically fascinating area, and one that is profoundly important for our ethical treatment of animals. But I also think it should not be done at the cost of abandoning the scientific method altogether, or of underestimating the implications of the fact that we don't understand the physical basis of our own consciousness, let alone that of other species." A Publishers Weekly contributor described Pleasurable Kingdom as "a brisk, erudite and enormously entertaining contribution to the growing genre of books about the emotions of animals."

Balcombe told CA: "While writing is a joy for me, I am also driven to write by the injustices still heaped upon all the creatures who try to share this planet with us. Science is now revealing so much about animals' awareness and sensitivity, yet our treatment of them remains in the dark ages. The ethic of compassion is indivisible; as long as we continue to disregard the interests of animals, the various injustices within human societies will persist."

FURTHER READINGS:

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

PERIODICALS

BioScience, January, 2007, Marian Stamp Dawkins, review of Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, p. 83.
Booklist, May 1, 2006, Nancy Bent, review of Pleasurable Kingdom, p. 58.
Hindu, January 11, 2007, "It Is Unethical to Harm Animals out of Scientific Curiosity"; January 19, 2007, Madhur Tankha, review of Pleasurable Kingdom.
Library Journal, May 1, 2006, Ann Forister, review of Pleasurable Kingdom, p. 115.
News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 21, 2006, Ellen Sung, "Look Who's Coming: Jonathan Balcombe" (interview).
Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2006, review of Pleasurable Kingdom, p. 50.
Times of India, January 24, 2007, review of Pleasurable Kingdom.
ONLINE

Animal Consultants International, http://www.animalconsultants.org/ (May 7, 2007), author's resume.
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Web site, http://www.pcrm.org/ (May 7, 2007), biography.
Pleasurable Kingdom Web site, http://www.pleasurablekingdom.com (May 7, 2007).
Popular Science Online, http://www.popularscience.co.uk/ (May 7, 2007), Martin O'Brien, review of Pleasurable Kingdom.
Seattle Times Online, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ (November 1, 2006), Michael C. Bradbury, review of Pleasurable Kingdom.

QUOTED: "some people still question whether fish feel pain. Really there's no question in my mind based on the evidence that I've looked at. And I - I've looked at this quite extensively in my research for this book. A number of studies have been done on trout, very detailed, meticulous studies in the lab where the animals are terminally anesthetized and then different anatomy was found. They have pain receptors that are sensitive to heat, to different chemicals and different sensors to mechanical, such as piercing sorts of pain."

Fish Have Feelings, Too: The Inner Lives Of Our 'Underwater Cousins'
Fresh Air. 2016. From Literature Resource Center.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We've become increasingly aware of the suffering of animals in factory farms. Many people have become vegetarians to do their part to spare animals from slaughter. But when it comes to fish - well, most people don't think about fish as having feelings. A new book makes the case they do. It's called "What A Fish Knows," and it's written by my guest Jonathan Balcombe, the director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy. Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings.

Balcombe examines the scientific evidence that fish experience pain, have memory and are capable of learning. He says thanks to the 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. Jonathan Balcombe, welcome to FRESH AIR.

BALCOMBE: Thanks for having me, Terry.

GROSS: So you say the capacity to feel, to suffer pain, to experience joy - that those are the bedrock of ethics and that that's what qualifies one for the moral community. So do fish feel? Do they suffer? Do they experience joy? Do they have emotions? I mean, how can we tell if they have emotions?

BALCOMBE: Yeah, all of the above...

GROSS: 'Cause it's not like they purr or that they cuddle with us or that they rub up against us for attention like - like our pets do.

BALCOMBE: Well, actually some of them do. You can go into reef areas where there are large groupers who've been living there for years, decades in some cases. And it's a safe area where they say no fishing or spearfishing, and they become trusting. And they will approach trusted divers. Whether they're recognizing them as individuals, I don't know. But there was a new study this week showing individual recognition of human faces by fishes, so they probably do recognize individual divers.

And they come up to be stroked. It is almost like a dog. And I don't know that they roll over to have their belly petted, although some sharks will be sent into what looks like a euphoric state when they have their bellies rubbed. And I just watched a video the other day of a couple of intrepid divers rubbing the faces of tiger sharks. These guys go in the water regularly with sharks. They're on a mission, and the tiger sharks appeared to love it.

And you can also measure internal physiological changes, endorphins and pleasure compounds in the bloodstream. And you can measure cortisol, which shows that an animal's stressed. There's one study I really like of surgeonfishes where they stress them. I felt bad for the fishes in this study, although I'm happy to say they return them to the Great Barrier Reef when they were done. But they stress them for half an hour, and then they gave them the opportunity to swim up next to a wand which was modeled on a cleaner fish, which moved back and forth and could give them caresses. And when they were stressed, they would go right up and sidle up next to that wand and receive these caresses from this model. And they could measure that the stress hormones went significantly down.

Fishes who were in a - had an ability to swim up next to a model that wasn't moving and therefore couldn't deliver caresses was ignored. They didn't swim up to that, and they didn't show declining stress. So there are clever ways of studying internal states of animals, fishes included.

GROSS: I'm still trying to wrap my head around somebody tickling a shark's belly.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Like, who would be doing that? OK. So how can we tell if fish feel pain? I mean, we're used to some kind of cry or scream from an animal if they experience pain. And if the fish is making a sound, we're probably not hearing it.

BALCOMBE: Yeah, it's curious. There's still - some people still question whether fish feel pain. Really there's no question in my mind based on the evidence that I've looked at. And I - I've looked at this quite extensively in my research for this book. A number of studies have been done on trout, very detailed, meticulous studies in the lab where the animals are terminally anesthetized and then different anatomy was found. They have pain receptors that are sensitive to heat, to different chemicals and different sensors to mechanical, such as piercing sorts of pain. And these signals are sent to the brain, and they affect the hormones in the animals. They affect the behavior. The animals change their behavior. They may stop eating.

There's one other study I think I'd like to describe to you, though. I think it's, for want of a better word, the most elegant study of fish pain that I've ever seen. It was done a few years ago by a biologist named Lynne Sneddon, who's in the U.K. And she used zebrafishes, which are very commonly used in research. And what they did was they put these group of zebrafishes - I don't remember how many, perhaps 30 - in a complex tank that had two chambers. One chamber was enriched. It had rocks and vegetation, and the other chamber was barren. It was open.

And you can probably guess which chamber these fishes spent all their time in. It was the enriched one. Fishes like places to hide. They like stimulation in their environments. And then they injected the fishes either with one of two things. One was with an acid solution, which is known to be caustic and presumably painful to these fishes if they can feel pain. And then the other ones - the other half of the fishes were randomly selected - were injected with saline, which causes just the pierce of the needle. And then the pain is not going to be lasting because it's not acidic.

And then they watched to see how they behaved, and they all remained swimming in the enriched tank. And then they dissolved a painkiller solution in the barren, undesirable chamber of this complex tank. And lo and behold, some of the fishes then started to migrate across and swim and hang out in that normally undesirable tank. And it was only the ones injected with the acid and not the ones injected with the saline. So I find that a pretty convincing demonstration of pain in fishes.

GROSS: The Humane Society, where you work, publishes a journal about animal sentience, animals' ability to feel. And you're an associate editor of that. It recently published an article about whether fish can feel pain. The article said they don't. And then there was this long, (laughter) long number of dissenting opinions, including one of yours, that came afterwards. So is this a big debate now in the scientific community?

BALCOMBE: Well, you could say it's a big debate in a paper like that. And responses are being published in the current era. I don't think it is a big debate for the simple reason that there are very few scientists who are actively arguing that fishes do not feel pain. I think if you surveyed scientists, the great majority would say, yes, of course, they feel pain. They're a member of the vertebrate clan. They have all of the physiological, behavioral attributes that we would expect of an animal that can feel pain.

And, yes, and as you say, the great bulk of responses to that article were rebuttals. And the primary argument being made by the gentleman who wrote that paper is that they lack a neocortex, the sort of cauliflower structure sort of part of our brain that's found in the mammals. And that's, I think, the crux of what weakens that argument is it is only found in the mammals. Birds don't have a neocortex. Their very effective brains evolved in a different path, and it's the paleocortex that became the sort of thinking part of their brain.

And yet, nobody's really debating whether birds can feel pain, never mind that they can also learn language. And they can do a lot of other sophisticated things. And one of the things I try to show in this book is that fishes really deserve equal consideration to all the other vertebrates. When you look at the bulk, at the cumulative evidence we now have, it's quite clear to me that they are full members of the vertebrates and they deserve the same sort of respect that we accord mammals and birds when we're at our best.

GROSS: So what's the next step? Fish deserve kind of, you know, equal moral consideration. What are the implications of that?

BALCOMBE: They're huge, of course. Depending on who's doing the estimate, we humans kill between 150 billion and over 2 trillion fishes a year. If you lined them up end to end, they'd reach the sun and back, at the higher estimate. So the numbers are astronomical. And the way they die, certainly in commercial fishing, is really pretty grim. They die most often from suffocation in air but also getting crushed in these huge fishing nets when they're drawn up, decompression - fishes have swim bladders, which are very useful for them, adding buoyancy, but they expand as the pressure drops when the fishes are being raised to the surface. And that can crush or may bring organs or push things out of their mouths. That's probably not a very nice way to die either. And then sometimes they may be bled out on the deck, which is perhaps a little faster but probably not - also not very pleasant for them. So there's a lot of change that would be needed to reflect an improvement in our relationship with fishes.

GROSS: So fish experience pain where actually the fishing industry has some very probably painful ways of catching fish.

BALCOMBE: Yeah, it's not pleasant for them. Nets, trawlers that go along the bottom, which are just rapacious. It's been likened to running a bulldozer over a rain forest if you had a big enough bulldozer. And there's this awful issue of bycatch, which are unwanted species that are caught by these largely indiscriminate nets and catching methods, and they get all crushed in there as well. And so they're either dying or dead when they reach the deck in many cases. Very few of by-caught animals survive if they're tossed back, which is routinely the case. They are typically tossed back into the oceans.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jonathan Balcombe. He's the author of the new book "What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." And he's the director of Animal Sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy. Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk more about fish. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Jonathan Balcombe, and he writes about animals. His new book is called "What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins." He's the director of animal sentience with the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy. And sentience is the ability to feel.

So I think a question people ask themselves if they ask do fish feel, should we consider fish in our moral universe, they likely ask themselves are fish smart? I mean, do they have intelligence? Is that, like, an appropriate question to ask? We talked a little bit about the controversy in science that you say is pretty much resolved about whether fish are intelligent. You say most scientists now think that they are, that they have some intelligence. Should that matter when we're thinking morally about how we treat fish?

BALCOMBE: I think it's relevant. You can certainly find parallels between intelligence or brain capacity and sentience. I think that may be fair. But I think more - it's probably - I mean, sentience is like pregnancy. You're either pregnant or you're not. You're either sentient or you're not. And if an animal is sentient, which means some kind of conscious awareness but particularly the capacity to feel pain and I would say by extension to feel pleasure, then to me that means that animal has moral traction, or it should have moral traction, that the animal is deserving of consideration of others because that animal can have a good day and a bad day and can have good or bad things happen to them. And that's, as I say, the bedrock of ethics.

GROSS: OK, so let's look at whether fish have intelligence. First of all, like, how do they perceive? Like, we have five senses - vision, smell, hearing, touch and taste. Fish live under water. What do they have to perceive the world around them?

BALCOMBE: Yeah, they have all those five. We also have another - a number of others that we often don't - we don't include on that vaunted list of five. We really probably should - a sense of balance, a sense of pleasure, a sense of pain. We've been talking about that. They, of course - they have all of those as well. But they have a couple of other pretty neat senses that are worth mentioning.

One is a sense of water pressure or movement in the water that's very acute thanks to a lateral line. We're talking about bony fishes now, not the sharks and rays, which are in a separate group, the cartilaginous fishes, which have really cool adaptations as well. But the bony fishes have a lateral line. You may notice a dark row of scales along the center line of a bony fish. And that's actually the shadow cast by these specialized scales because there's a depression in each one. And in that depression are specialized little cup-like chambers with gel in them and little hairs that stick out. And they detect pressure changes, so it's very useful for navigating at night, for avoiding dangerous things in limited-vision conditions and that sort of thing.

Another really cool sense is electrical. Some fishes, including sharks and I think rays as well, are electro receptive. They can detect electrical signals from other organisms. But there's also electric-producing fishes. The knifefishes of South America and the elephantnose fishes, named for a long projection on their faces, of Africa, appropriately. They - they're both electric producing. So they have EODs, which are electric organ discharges, and they use those as communication signals. And they communicate in some pretty cool ways. They will change their own frequency if they're swimming by another fish with a similar frequency so they don't jam and confuse each other. They also show deference by shutting off their EODs when they're passing by a territory holder. They don't want to - you don't want to piss off the territory holder, so it's probably better to sort of go, quote, unquote, "silent" during that time. So the perceptions and sensory abilities of fishes, well, they're the product of over 400 million years of evolution, so it might not surprise us that they've got some pretty cool ways of sensing their environments.

GROSS: One of the cool capacities that some fish have - let's look at flounders. Flounders - they're born with one eye on each side of their body. Then you say the eye - one of the eyes migrates. So eventually both eyes are on the same side. That just seems bizarre. I mean, I don't even understand how an eye can migrate like that. So can you explain what you know about flounder (unintelligible)?

BALCOMBE: Yeah, evolution is a boundless innovator. And one of the real joys of researching and writing books about animals is to see what sort of things that evolution comes up with. And certainly eye migration in flounders is one example of that. In some flounders the eye migrates in just I think as short as a day. It almost makes you wonder if it hurts. But it is quite remarkable, and it's all coded in the genes.

And it allows adult flounders to be much more effective at A, hiding from enemies, and B, hiding from their prey because what they do is they - they're literally called flatfishes and flatfish. And they sit on the bottom often under the sand, but they're also brilliant at disguising themselves by mimicking the substrate. And I have a photo in the book of the same flounder taken a few minutes apart in four locations who blends in beautifully to the background. So they are sort of chameleons of the sea.

And by having both those eyes on one side, they can lie flatly on the bottom with both eyes up, and they can swivel their eyes around. And they can watch out without being seen unless a shark with that electroreception comes by and might detect their heartbeat under the sand. So there are tradeoffs, of course.

GROSS: And each eye moves independently.

BALCOMBE: Yes, a number of fishes have eyes that move independently, again, also chameleon-like. That's something I love about chameleon lizards is they have those eerie and very cute pointy eyes that swivel independently. And being able to do that is useful. And I - you have to wonder how does that affect the perceptual experience of a fish or a lizard for that matter if you're taking in two visual fields at the same time? I don't know if anyone's really asked that question.

GROSS: Right. Just getting back to the idea of eye migration, that one eye on the side of the face migrates to the other side of the face in flounder, is it that one eye closes and a new eye is born on the other side, or does it literally, like, travel across (laughter) the body of the flounder to get to the other side?

BALCOMBE: My understanding is the eye actually migrates. It moves. It doesn't disappear and then pop out on the other side.

GROSS: Wow, that's just so hard to fathom. That's really fascinating.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So you say that fish can hear and that they make sounds. They're under water; we're on land, so I don't know if divers hear any sounds underneath. But what kind of sounds do they make, and what are some of the ways they make those sounds?

BALCOMBE: Yeah, I have a list of words that I couldn't resist stringing together somewhere in the book - you know, clicks, pops, rasps, buzzes, burrs, purrs. I forget the other ones. I think there were about 15 or 20 words on that list. It is quite a symphony of different sounds they can make. They're not necessarily really tonal sounds. Some of them are, and some fishes are named for the sounds they make - grunts, for instance, and I think toadfish is maybe named for that, although they maybe look a bit like toads. But there certainly are quite a few fishes named for their sounds.

They produce them in different ways. Some fishes grind their teeth together. Some fishes grind their bones together. Limb movements I think may be used in some cases. And the swim bladder I mentioned earlier is quite useful for making sounds. You know, we use our lungs as an air producer. So swim bladders have gas in them, and they can be rubbed and air can be expelled or gases can be expelled. And so swim bladders are often involved in sound.

There is one really curious example, though, involving herrings that I can't resist mentioning. I think if you were to come up with a phrase that best captures at least a delicate phrase - flatulent communication would be perhaps the right phrase. They live in big schools, and they emit gases from the anus in large numbers. And it makes a sound, and they appear to use this as a communication device to maybe - to signal to others that it's time we moved up or down in the water column because it's that time of day when the predators are coming out and this sort of thing. And the researchers who studied it use the more technical term frequent repetitive ticks. And I'll leave it to the listener to make an acronym out of that, which is quite appropriate behavior.

GROSS: Oh, that's very funny. OK, so if fish produce, you know, what you've described in the book as hums, purrs, clicks, moans, chirps, buzzes, growls, snaps - I mean, are they audible to the human ear, or is this, like, waves in the water that could be interpreted as sound but aren't exactly sound?

BALCOMBE: Real sound. It's a real sound.

GROSS: It's a real sound?

BALCOMBE: It's real vibrations in the water. And if you have - if you have dived or snorkeled on reefs, particularly the U.K., you can often hear this cacophony of snapping and popping sounds going on. And it's constant sounds. And some of it may not be directly produced by the fish in terms of trying to make a sound to communicate. Sometimes it's the sound of parrotfishes' mouths crunching away on corals. But a lot of those sounds are made in a - sort of a communication role.

GROSS: My guest is Jonathan Balcombe, author of the new book "What A Fish Knows." We'll talk more after a break, and we'll hear from Ellie Kemper, who stars in the Netflix series "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and co-starred in "The Office" as the receptionist Erin. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Jonathan Balcombe, author of the new book "What A Fish Knows." The book makes the case that fish experience pain, have memory and are capable of learning. The book is based on recent research. Balcombe says that what we're learning about fish has implications for how we catch and consume them. He's the director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy.

So getting back to fish intelligence. Give us an example of a fish that does something that you perceive as intelligent.

BALCOMBE: One of my favorite examples is from a humble little pouty-mouthed fish of intertidal zones called the frillfin goby. A series of experiments in captivity actually done in New York City were done over several decades that reveal a pretty remarkable skill - some form of intelligence involving spatial memory. As I say, these fishes live in intertidal zones, so they live in that area between sort of rocks between high and low tide. And so at low tide, it's a bunch of rock pools, and they hang out in those rock pools. And we notice that to escape danger, say, an octopus prowling around through the rock pools, they will jump with great accuracy to neighboring pools. And they can actually work their way out to the open sea again by jumping into successive neighboring rock pools. Well, why - how are they doing that? How do they know how far to jump and which direction to jump in?

And it turns out through a series of these captive experiments where this guy set up fake rock pools, it turns out that these gobies memorize the topography of the rock pool at high tide when the water is in, and they can swim over it. And so they're sort of translating an aerial view into a - sort of a horizontal view for want of a better term. It's what you might call a mental map. And they're able to use that information to accurately leap and to avoid making a leap of faith.

And this - in the study, I remember a couple of numbers. When they had not had a chance to swim over these rock pools, they had about a 15 percent success rate when he poked a stick in or tried to scare them into jumping. And they would jump, and they would be stranded on the rocks in those situations most of the time. But they had about a 97 percent success rate if they had had an opportunity to swim over it. So a clever experiment that shows a pretty remarkable form of intelligence in a very small fish.

GROSS: So they can learn what's there by swimming over it once and then remember it as well.

BALCOMBE: That's right, learning and memory goes on there. And just about any study of social behavior in a fish has found individual recognition that they recognize each other's faces. They remember them over the course of their lives.

I describe a number of other memory experiments. One of the most interesting, most impressive feats of learning in a fish is the archerfish, which is named for its ability to catch prey - often flying insects or perched insects - by shooting water from their groove-shaped mouth at these animals above the surface. They have to account for the refraction index of the water surface and a number of other things. And they have to account for the speed of the flying insect.

And studies show that naive, novice archerfishes who are new to this, they're very poor at it. They can't even hit a moving object going at just half - a half an inch per second. They can't hit that with their stream of water. But if they're given the opportunity to watch other experienced adult archerfishes plying their trade and shooting at objects accurately without any personal experience themselves, they - when given a new opportunity, they show a marked increase in their accuracy. So they can learn very well by observational learning.

And there are a number of examples of that that that I point out in the book of what biologists call audience effects, where fishes changed their behavior according to who's watching, how many are watching and what the circumstances are.

GROSS: So since you firmly believe that fish have the capacity to feel, that they have intelligence, that they feel pain and that we therefore shouldn't punish them, what do you think of fish as pets?

BALCOMBE: Well, they're lovely to look at and they're graceful and beautiful. And I remember visiting a couple of aquariums in people's homes during the research of my book. And I remember being invited to feed some discus fishes with some food that I held in my - between my thumb and finger. And these - one of these discus fish came up and just - I could feel the tug as this individual pulled the food from my hand. And I got - I get a lot of stories from people, anecdotes of people who live with fishes and become very attached to them. And the relationship is touching and often moving and maybe span a decade or more. And they grieve their loss. And so definitely there's some lovely parts of the relationship between captive fishes and their humans if they're well looked after.

Having said that, there's certainly problematic areas of the whole aquarium industry itself. The aquarium industry is very actually quite disturbing in terms of the capture of wild fishes, mostly from reefs because that's where the beautiful colorful little ones that are so popular in reefs are particularly sought after. Some of the methods used to catch them are pretty awful - cyanide poisoning, which often kills many of the fishes being targeted or ones that are not being targeted. And explosive devices are sometimes used, and then you have the vicissitudes of transport, where they're shipped over continents. And the mortality rates are quite high.

One of my affiliate organizations, Humane Society International, which is under the umbrella of the Humane Society of the U.S., for whom I work, they have an active campaign now to draw attention to the Blue Tang, which is the star of the sequel to "Finding Nemo," the new film "Finding Dory," which, by the way, my book was strategically time to come out around the same time as. And Dory is a blue tang, and they are going to be probably very popular in the aquarium trade because of the fact that this film will draw a lot of attention to that species. Well, unfortunately, blue tangs are caught in the wild. And they are subject to the - some of the ills of the industry.

And so we are campaigning actively to try to discourage - to discourage people from buying these fishes because it's like I said earlier, when you when you purchase a product, you tell the manufacturer to do it again. And we don't really want that happening.

GROSS: If you're just joining, us my guest is Jonathan Balcombe, and he's the author of the new book "What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins." And he's the director of animal sentience - sentience is the capacity to feel - he's the director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy. We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jonathan Balcombe. He's the author of the new book, "What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins."

You're vegan. We need things to eat. Not everybody wants to be or can be vegan. So assuming that people continue to eat fish, what do you think are the most humane forms of fishing now? Do you have any hope for fish farming, that there could be a way of doing that - sure, the fish die, but at least could they die less cruelly?

BALCOMBE: Yeah. Well, there's always improvements that can be made. I would go back to what you said earlier. I think most of us - a lot of people maybe don't want to become vegan. Although, I would suggest that that's just because they don't realize what an incredible diversity of plant-based foods are available. And there's a real revolution happening in plant-based foods with both meat substitutes but also - and even in-vitro meats is a rising phenomenon where you can make meat from animal tissue that never involved any slaughterhouse or factory farming or transportation trucks because the - it's all done in tissue culture. So the options there are becoming much broader. And they're - veganism is something I would encourage listeners to look into.

Having said that, yeah, I mean, there are certainly improvements we can make. And I think it is - it's not making it humane. It's making it less inhumane. I think we just have to be realistic that if we are raising animals for human consumption, the economies of scale and the scale that it needs to be done - if you're going to be feeding a few billion mouths - is such that there's going to be confinement. There's going to be - animals are going to be stripped of their opportunity to engage in normal behaviors.

Let me just mention one study came out this past week which found that farmed salmon - a lot of them become dropouts. That's the term they used. I don't mean to sound like teenagers who start smoking on street corners and taking drugs. I'm talking about essentially giving up on life. They become listless.

And measures of their physiology suggest that they're actually severely depressed. They fit the hallmarks both behaviorally and physiologically of severe depression. Can we ask them if they're depressed? No, and that's one of the challenges, of course, of any study of animal feelings is that we have to surmise based on evidence.

But the evidence supports that they are really miserable to the extent that they give up. They weigh about one-third what the other fishes weigh. And it's probably because they have no control over their lives and they - there's probably other aggressive fishes who attack them and chase them and they - it's probably terrifying. And so they become miserable and depressed, and they just wither away.

GROSS: So one of the subjects you're interested in, you know, for animals, is the question of do animals experience pleasure? I mean, we've talked about do animals experience pain - do fish experience pain? And you say, yes, fish experience pain. And we should take that into consideration when we decide if we're going to eat fish or not and when we figure out how we're going to farm fish or catch fish.

But why are you so interested in the question of whether and how animals and fish experience pleasure?

BALCOMBE: Yeah. Thanks for asking that. Pleasure is so often overlooked. And I think it's so important. That's why I've written two books about animal pleasure in the past. And I certainly made sure I included some discussion of pleasure in this book. Pleasure adds so much richness to life. It's pleasure and not pain that makes life worth living. And so I think it's so important to include pleasure in - when we evaluate other lives - or our own, for that matter.

And certainly, if you look at how fishes behave, pleasure is a big motivator for them just as it is for other sentient animals. It's the - the reason, I think, pleasure evolved is it's nature's way of encouraging good, adaptive behaviors just as pain is nature's way of discouraging maladaptive behaviors, behaviors that risk injury and/or death which are, in the genetic stakes, really bad outcomes.

Is it any wonder that we're motivated - that we love food? We love the taste of it. Is it any wonder that fruit - which plants produce to really distribute their own seeds - why they're attractive to look at? They've got bright colors. They've got nice smells, sweet tastes and a big, nutritional reward.

As for fishes, well, there's not so many fishes that eat fruit. There are some, actually. But they have their ways of feeling and expressing pleasure. And I think touch is perhaps the most key sensory realm where fishes can get pleasure.

It's a good opportunity to mention these - this wonderful, very complex cleaner-client mutualism or symbiosis that you find typically on reefs where you have cleaner fishes of different species but often it's a cleaner wrasse, and they may work individually or in pairs or even small teams. And they hang out at a particular station on the reef. And then client fishes will line up to wait their turn to receive a spa treatment, essentially. They swim in and they hover there.

I've watched this during dives myself. And it's been very well studied. And they get plucked over by these cleaners. And the clients cooperate. They open their mouths. And the cleaners swim in to look for parasites and algae and what have you. Clients never eat the cleaners because it's just not good to eat your business partner. And then they open their gills, and the cleaners go in there. So it's a trade-off. The cleaners get food, and the clients get this spa treatment.

And while it's certainly adaptive to have parasites removed, I suspect that the way - the reason, the main reason, the clients return time and again to these cleaning stations is because it feels nice. It feels good. And I think there's further support for that. The cleaners will curry favor with clients by pausing from their cleaning ministrations. And they will actually move - rapidly move their pectoral fins to give caresses to the clients on their skin. And it's sort of a way to say hey, look, you know, come to me, you get good service. But I did want to mention it partly to point out the - the role of the pleasure of touch in these animals' lives.

GROSS: So obviously you love animals. Do you have pets?

BALCOMBE: Currently, I don't. I travel a lot. I mean, I have an unknown number of intestinal parasites probably. But I wouldn't really call those pets.

GROSS: (Laughter).

BALCOMBE: But other than that no. I've certainly lived with cats and dogs. I've had rats. And I certainly recommend rats, despite their often negative reputation. They actually make wonderful companions. They're very social. And if you get them when they're young, they're very malleable. They can learn their names. They'll play games with you. But no because I do travel, I worry about them being left without me because they're - certainly dogs especially - are highly social and they can really miss their companions.

GROSS: Jonathan Balcombe, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you so much.

BALCOMBE: Terry, thank you for having me.

GROSS: Jonathan Balcombe is the author of "What A Fish Knows." After we take a short break, we'll hear from Ellie Kemper, who stars in the Netflix series "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and costarred in "The Office" as the receptionist Erin. This is FRESH AIR.

Not so cold­blooded
Philip Hoare
Spectator.
333.9828 (Jan. 7, 2017): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
What a Fish Knows
by Jonathan Balcombe
One World, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 288
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The recent furore over a freakshow ice rink in Japan, with hapless fishes embedded beneath the skaters' feet, was
inexplicable to some. The fish were dead already, weren't they, bought from the market? What's the difference between
eating them and gliding over their artlessly strewn bodies, posed as if in a frozen shoal like the porpoises Virginia
Woolf's Orlando glimpses in an iced­up Thames?
The difference is us. In a world sensitive to every nuance of use and consumption, fishes, like the sea in which most of
them swim, are the new frontier. As the queer theorist and Sydney­based academic Elisabeth Probyn notes in her new
book, Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press), our modern sensitivities­­and the middle­class­driven search for
ethically­sourced food­­have resulted in a remorseless expansion. We are eating twice the amount of fish now that we
were eating in the 1960s; the same period has seen a 50 per cent fall in fish populations.
It is ironic that as the acidifying, warming oceans rise, we look increasingly to their denizens to sustain our
unsustainable populations. Probyn writes evocatively of the 'fork­wavers' who turn meals into political battlefields, as if
our allegiances and all the world's wrongs were embodied in a mouthful. But if that wasn't enough, along comes the
American scientist and author Jonathan Balcombe to challenge our preconceptions about fishes­­to the extent that he
declines to employ the collective plural, seeing them as sentient individuals rather than a resource.
2/12/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486940542265 2/10
When it comes to empathy, fishes have a marketing problem. They're cold­blooded, seemingly simple creatures,
occupying an element that seems far removed from ours. That alien quality, Balcombe intimates, allows us to treat them
the way we do. We do not, apparently, shudder at the sight of their gasping bodies thrashing in pain as they suffocate in
a net or on the deck of a trawler. Recreational anglers seem self­excused by virtue of the fact that they return their catch
to the water, but their catches are traumatised by the experience, and often blinded by the hooks. In this disconnection,
even some so­called vegetarians (such as this reviewer) eat them, hypocritically, 'as if there were no moral distinction
between a cod and a cucumber'.
Yet we are all fishes in the womb, with residual gills and fins instead of fingers, swimming in our amniotic seas. Fishes
were the first to develop hearing, and colour vision. They can 'taste' with their entire bodies, and appear to enjoy being
touched. 'Your life a sluice of sensations,' as D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1921 poem, 'Fish'. Far from the cliché of a
three­second memory span ascribed to a goldfish in a bowl (a denuded environment now outlawed in parts of Europe),
fishes remember the humans that feed them, and can accomplish cognitive mapping. They can even point to objects in
referential gestures seen elsewhere only in primates and corvids: Red Sea groupers have been observed indicating prey
to moray eels, with whom they co­operatively hunt.
Crucially, they also feel and remember pain, as the sometimes gruesome experiments that Balcombe describes
demonstrate: he recognises the paradox that his book draws on science that has purposefully blinded, maimed and
otherwise ill­treated its subjects to solicit responses which prove, or disprove, how like us they may be. Fishes show
fear and consciousness. In one experiment, trout subjected to injected venom would show visible signs of distress­­
increased gill beats­­which was ameliorated by the administration of morphine. Indeed, these trials really did point up
their closeness to us: dosed with cocaine, other fishy subjects begin to abuse the drug.
Balcombe's chapters on fish behaviour are remarkable. As socially organised creatures, fishes demonstrate 'an
attunement that goes beyond mere co­existence'. Cleaner wrasse service their clients­­fellow fishes whose parasites they
eat­­in order, like the queue in a barber's shop. They even recognise returning customers and allow them preferential
treatment. Such behaviour indicates culture, to Balcombe: traditions transmitted by learning, rather than instinct or
genes. Mating pufferfishes will create intricate patterns in the sand, decorated with shells, to attract mates, much as
bower birds assemble similar structures. Other fishes' adaptability extends as far as changing sex ('with no need for
expensive surgery', as the author quips). It's a useful technique for those fishes that occupy the benthic, sunless depths
where it's difficult to tell who's a boy or a girl. They simply switch from being sperm provider to egg producer,
depending on the demands of the situation.
Fishes are 'not just things, but beings', Balcombe concludes. 'A fish feels and knows.' They experience pain and
pleasure, they play and perceive. Yet we continue to treat them as slimy extensions of the food chain, ignoring their
increasing rarity. To eat a tuna, Balcombe says, is equivalent to eating a tiger. Below the ocean's skin, in Herman
Melville's phrase, fishes constitute the most polluted food we eat, with up to 85,000 of the 125,000 new chemicals we
have produced since the industrial revolution found in their bodies. It may indeed be their final revenge for all those
fish­and­chip suppers.
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Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hoare, Philip. "Not so cold­blooded." Spectator, 7 Jan. 2017, p. 32. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476665433&it=r&asid=db04892ddb57a89c435bd50fd8b701bc.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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QUOTED: "will appeal to fans of odd science and animal rights advocates alike."

Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The
Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
Lisa Peet
Library Journal.
141.10 (June 1, 2016): p118.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. Farrar. Jun. 2016.290p. notes.
index. ISBN 9780374288211. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374714338. NAT HIST
Ethologist Balcombe (The Exultant Ark) is an advocate for fish­­or, as he prefers, fishes ("individuals with personalities
and relationships")­­and he makes a strong case for piscine perception. Weaving decades of scientific studies offish
consciousness, cognition, and social structure, he offers a picture of these underwater creatures as complex and sentient
beings. Not only do they have acute senses of sight, hearing, and smell, but they also have the capacity to feel pleasure
as well as pain. Some species form hierarchical grooming cooperatives, hunt in interspecies packs, help raise
nonbiological offspring while waiting their turn to fertilize eggs, and recognize one another after months apart. At times
the recitation of "believe it or not" knowledge bites can feel like overreaching to make a point; at others, Balcombe
edges toward a decidedly unscientific whimsy­­he never met a fish pun he didn't like. Yet altogether, this is a lively and
surprising work that makes a strong argument for sport and food fishing reform. VERDICT This may ruin readers' fish
dinners forever but will appeal to fans of odd science and animal rights advocates alike.­­Lisa Peet, Library Journal
Peet, Lisa
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Peet, Lisa. "Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Library Journal, 1
June 2016, p. 118. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453919993&it=r&asid=ec014bc7f9d17f09ba1416cd80bca10e.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our
Underwater Cousins
Ray Olson
Booklist.
112.18 (May 15, 2016): p7.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. By Jonathan Balcombe. June 2016.304p. illus.
Scientific American, $27 (9780374288211). 597.
Balcombe (The Exultant Ark, 2011) cites Finding Nemo several times in this sparkling exposition on "our underwater
cousins." That may seem odd in a science book, but it's entirely appropriate to its central thrust, which is that fish are
sentient, social, and individuated, like their Disney­animated avatars. As humans' fellow vertebrates, they've developed
from the same blueprint, so to speak, though for hundreds of millions of years longer­­time enough to hone the senses
of sight, hearing, smell, taste, orientation, touch, and more to be capable of the superhuman achievements Balcombe
reports in the early parts of the book. The really big news here arrives in the central sections on emotions ("From Stress
to Joy"); thinking (using tools, planning); knowledge (memory); and sociality (shoaling­schooling, cooperation,
peacekeeping) in fish. Although a little of the research that discovered the gamut of fish capabilities hails from the early
twentieth century, the preponderance of it is quite recent, reflecting, Balcombe concludes (in a compelling pitch for
greatly expanding fish conservation), "growing awareness of our [i.e., human] interdependence with all life."­­Ray
Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 7. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913504&it=r&asid=3269e2ff3d5fbde824088d4d666ab702.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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QUOTED: "With the vivacious energy of a cracking good storyteller, Balcombe draws deeply from scientific studies and his own experience."

What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our
Underwater Cousins
Publishers Weekly.
263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
Jonathan Balcombe. FSG/Scientific American, $27 (304p) ISBN 978­0­374­28821­1
In this entertaining study, ethologist Balcombe (The Exultant Ark) points out that fish are some 60% of all vertebrates
on earth, yet they receive little regard outside of being a source of food or object of sport. With the vivacious energy of
a cracking good storyteller, Balcombe draws deeply from scientific studies and his own experience with fish to
introduce readers to them as sentient creatures that live full lives governed by cognition and perception. He illustrates a
piscine capacity for joy and pleasure in the case of a Midas cichlid that returns again and again to a trusted human to be
stroked and sometimes held out of the water. Balcombe cites instances of alteration in one fish's behavior when a
traumatic event occurs to another fish in the same tank, concluding that the two are emotionally attuned to each other.
Fish, he observes, also actively play with other creatures, and he offers examples that illustrate awareness and intention
coupled with a sense of amusement. Balcombe makes a convincing case that fish possess minds and memories, are
capable of planning and organizing, and cooperate with one another in webs of social relationships. Agent: Stacey G
lick, Dystel & Goderich. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 74. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902740&it=r&asid=dcac5c17835a234f89a9554aba6ba038.
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QUOTED: "Graceful prose makes this an excellent introduction to
the examination of animal minds."

Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals
Nancy Brent
Booklist.
106.12 (Feb. 15, 2010): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals.
By Jonathan Balcombe.
Mar. 2010. 256p. Palgrave, $27 (9780230613621). 591.5.
Ethologist and author (Pleasurable Kingdom, 2006) Balcombe discusses the broad range of animal experience in this
new examination of how animals view the world. As famous South African novelist J. M. Coetzee asks in his foreward,
why should the onus fall on animals, whatever their species, to prove that they are sentient? Balcombe answers this
question by showing, through a broad­ranging review of both the scientific and philosophic literature, that animals think
and feel, that they are sentient and show morality, and that we can no longer treat animals cruelly and carelessly. By
examining animal intelligence, perception, and awareness in the first section of the book, the author brings readers into
the animals' experience and helps create appreciation for that experience. In the second section, Balcombe focuses on
animal interactions and sociality, demonstrating the sophistication of communication in animals and their resulting
emotions and morality. Finally, the author focuses on human coexistence with other animals and his views about how
we need to change our treatment of these other sentient beings. Graceful prose makes this an excellent introduction to
the examination of animal minds.­­Nancy Bent
YA/S: A perfect source for debaters; give to teens fascinated by more than just cute animals. NB.
Brent, Nancy
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Brent, Nancy. "Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 16. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA219830697&it=r&asid=461afc5331815943e8150e981bc213de.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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QUOTED: "Balcombe's brief, marred only slightly by sermonizing, builds to a passionate and persuasive argument for vegetarianism."
Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals
Publishers Weekly.
256.51 (Dec. 21, 2009): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Second Nature: The Inner Lives of
Animals
Jonathan Balcornbe, foreword by J.M.
Coetzee. Palgrave, $2 7 (256p) ISBN 978­0­23061362­1
Who knew that chickens and humans find the same faces beautiful? Or that fish choose reliable partners for "dangerous
predator inspection missions?" Referencing such intriguing studies, Balcombe (Pleasurable Kingdom) builds a
compelling case for blurring the line between animal and human perception, thereby questioning the prevailing
scientific orthodoxy that humans alone possess the ability to reason. Over the years, studies have shown that animals
have intelligence (dolphins have been known to teach themselves to delay gratification to get extra treats), emotions
(like humans, baboon mothers show elevated levels of glucocorticoids after losing an infant), cunning (gorillas divert
the attention of rivals from food, often by grooming); that they can communicate (nuthatches can translate chickadee
chirps), can be altruistic (chimps who know how to unlatch a door help those who can't). Yet philosophers have
routinely dismissed animals as unthinking, unfeeling beasts­Descartes grouped non­human animals with "machines," a
line of logic that has been used to justify callous treatment of laboratory animals. Balcombe's brief, marred only slightly
by sermonizing, builds to a passionate and persuasive argument for vegetarianism on both humanitarian and
environmental grounds. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals." Publishers Weekly, 21 Dec. 2009, p. 50+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA215249406&it=r&asid=7c658347c7939a830da565b1d964d105.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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QUOTED: "The book offers readers much to think about in
terms of moving away from the usually human­centered view of life."

Balcombe, Jonathan. Second nature: the inner
lives of animals
J.A. Mather
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
48.3 (Nov. 2010): p530.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48­1465
OL791
2009­30770 CIP
Balcombe, Jonathan. Second nature: the inner lives of animals. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 242p index ISBN
9780230613621, $27.00
This small book aims to persuade readers to think well of animals. The book is organized into three sections:
"Experience," "Coexistence," and "Emergence." "Experience" evaluates instances of animals' acting in ways that only
humans are expected to act. Here, animal research scientist Balcombe (Pleasurable Kingdom, 2006) focuses on animal
sensitivity, intelligence, emotions, and situational awareness. "Coexistence" outlines ways animals use sophisticated
communication, cooperate and coexist with others (even other species), and show a moral sense. In "Emergence,"
Balcombe points out ways the media portrays "nature" as cruel and grimly competitive and then notes that humans are
much crueler than animals. He ends this section by suggesting that humans need to end anthropocentric selfishness and
become more aware of what they do to animals and the planet out of greed. He discusses instances in which people
have generated regulations and adopted more­humane attitudes toward animals. The progression is clear and the
evidence, though somewhat scattered, is useful for general audiences. The book offers readers much to think about in
terms of moving away from the usually human­centered view of life. Summing Up. Recommended. ** Lower­division
undergraduates and general readers.­­J. A. Mather, University of Lethbridge
Mather, J.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Mather, J.A. "Balcombe, Jonathan. Second nature: the inner lives of animals." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, Nov. 2010, p. 530. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249221385&it=r&asid=ac9fada205f9942439426af667eb049d.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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Fish may not have facial expressions, but they
have personality
Nancy Szokan
The Washington Post.
(June 10, 2016): News:
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Szokan, Nancy. "Fish may not have facial expressions, but they have personality." Washington Post, 10 June 2016.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454723624&it=r&asid=2ed51f27078cac39e9cf04e9e8ad564c.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454723624

"Jonathan Balcombe." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000175053&it=r&asid=549d070286da112f754e7bb8274b5e6f. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Fish Have Feelings, Too: The Inner Lives Of Our 'Underwater Cousins'." Fresh Air, 20 June 2016. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455855887&it=r&asid=f3bf0e019f75fd3432793d3b02816a85. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Hoare, Philip. "Not so cold­blooded." Spectator, 7 Jan. 2017, p. 32. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476665433&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Peet, Lisa. "Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Library Journal, 1 June 2016, p. 118. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453919993&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Olson, Ray. "What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913504&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902740&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Brent, Nancy. "Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA219830697&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals." Publishers Weekly, 21 Dec. 2009, p. 50+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA215249406&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Mather, J.A. "Balcombe, Jonathan. Second nature: the inner lives of animals." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2010, p. 530. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249221385&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Szokan, Nancy. "Fish may not have facial expressions, but they have personality." Washington Post, 10 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454723624&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017

• Huffington Post
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mariappan-jawaharlal/book-review-what-a-fish-k_b_11796698.html
  Word count: 866

  QUOTED: "What a Fish Knows will change the way you view fishes and their world. After reading it, you won’t be the same person. In writing this book, Balcombe did not venture into the realm of speculation and did not let his emotions cloud his writing. He based his arguments on decades of research and relies on science and facts, while engaging the reader with anecdotes and stories."

  What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe
  09/01/2016 11:37 am ET | Updated Sep 01, 2016

  Dr. Mariappan Jawaharlal
  Professor of Mechanical Engineering California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

  When my first daughter was about six years old, I took her fishing for the first time in a small pond near Amherst, Massachusetts. I bought two fishing rods from a local K-Mart and headed to a nearby pond with her. I read all of the fishing rod instructions and followed the entire procedure carefully, but baiting the hook with worms seemed harder than solving a differential equation. A friendly neighbor saw my struggle and helped me out.

  Our first catch was a small sunfish. As soon as we got it out of the pond, it all got very messy: the fish was writhing in pain. I didn’t know how to remove the hook and release the fish safely. As a result, the fish died. We spent some more time there catching and releasing different fishes.

  I didn’t enjoy my first fishing experience at all—and my daughter hated it. Though she was only six, she said to me very clearly in her sweet but firm voice, “Dad, I don’t want to fish anymore.” That was our last fishing trip. My child knew intuitively that the fish were suffering.

  Interestingly, 20 years later, she was the one who asked to me read this book. What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe is of the most enlightening books I have ever read, and the one that made me view the world of fish with respect, humility and astonishment.

  Do you know that fishes perceive optical illusions just like us? Do you know that they can actually learn certain skills faster than a four-year old child or an adult chimpanzee can? Do you know that fishes can feel fear?

  We never think about fishes like other animals. Although we humans, mammals, birds and fishes are all vertebrates sharing a backbone that supports the body and the head, the human skeleton has much more in common with animals than fish. We can recognize the skull, forelimbs, hind limbs and many other features in our animal cousins, but not in fishes. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why we do not think about fishes as our distant cousins, and treat them as organisms without feelings when we catch and eat them. Of course, fishes can’t scream in pain. “Crying out in pain is as ineffective for a fish in air as crying out in pain is for us when we are submerged,” says Balcombe, who is the voice for our voiceless underwater cousins.

  Crying out in pain is as ineffective for a fish in air as crying out in pain is for us when we are submerged - Jonathan Balcomb
  What a Fish Knows will change the way you view fishes and their world. After reading it, you won’t be the same person. In writing this book, Balcombe did not venture into the realm of speculation and did not let his emotions cloud his writing. He based his arguments on decades of research and relies on science and facts, while engaging the reader with anecdotes and stories. The book is organized into thoughtful, logical chapters: “What a Fish Perceives,” “What a Fish Feels,” “What a Fish Thinks,” “What a Fish Knows,” and “How a Fish Breeds. The book, in vivid terms, explains fishes’ social life, playfulness, mastery in the use of tools, symbiotic relationship with other underwater creatures, sex-changing behaviors, and much more. You will be amazed to find that fishes have great memory, as well as unique personalities. The lives of our underwater cousins are very rich and full of surprises.

  Fishes don’t have eyelids, and their eyes are always open. Our eyes are shut tight when it comes to fishes. This book will open your eyes and show a glimpse of their world.
  Fishes don’t have eyelids, and their eyes are always open. Our eyes are shut tight when it comes to fishes. This book will open your eyes, show a glimpse of their world, and teach you a lot more than what you will ever learn about fishes from any other resource in your lifetime. Read this book. You won’t look at a fish the same way again. You may never even want to catch or eat one again.

  Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this blog please share it with your friends!

  Follow Dr. Mariappan Jawaharlal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jawa13

• Open Letters Monthly
  http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/closing-the-buffet/
  Word count: 2026

  QUOTED: "the author maintains a patient and hopeful tone throughout What a Fish Knows, even when confronted by the devastating reality of ocean acidification and collapsing fish stocks around the world."

  Closing the Buffet
  By Justin Hickey (June 1, 2016) No Comment
  What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins26114430
  By Jonathan Balcombe
  Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016

  In 1949, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz introduced his concept of the “baby schema,” which theorized that the large eyes, shorter snouts, and round wobbly heads of infant animals trigger caregiving urges in their parents. That this phenomenon crosses species lines is irrefutable, considering how much time we spend cooing at puppies and kittens—true fur babies—and any adult creature possessing a hint of benign fluffiness. If Lorenz were alive today, he’d nod in sage commiseration at our vast internet cache of videos and memes celebrating owls, raccoons, pigs, hedgehogs, rabbits, and ducklings (to name a few, in this reviewer’s order of Descending Cuddliness).

  How about fishes? The puffer gracing the cover of Jonathan Balcombe’s new book, What a Fish Knows, stares out with a rascally mien, as if daring us to deny that he is, indeed, cute. With both eyes facing front, playful spots and stripes, and translucent fins whirling, you could say he’s all wobbly head. Might your first instinct be to pet his forehead, rather than see him sautéed on a plate?

  Balcombe, a Humane Society ethologist who’s written about animals as sentient individuals of emotional complexity in Pleasurable Kingdom (2006) and Second Nature (2010), favors petting. Now he aims to show, through both the latest science and fabulous anecdotes, that “fishes are not just sentient, but aware, communicative, social, tool-using, virtuous, even Machiavellian.” Like author Sy Montgomery’s foray into similar pools with last year’s National Book Award finalist, The Soul of an Octopus, Balcome’s What a Fish Knows is meant primarily for those who treat the ocean like a buffet table, rather than the fascinating, fragile alien world that it is.

  For example, it shouldn’t surprise animal lovers to learn that male puffers, while courting females, make sand art on the ocean floor. Sandy mandalas are created when the puffer swims on his side while fluttering a pectoral fin, and are further beautified with bits of crushed seashell sprinkled in the center. Balcombe reveals this elaborate courtship gesture, akin to the architectural flourishes of bower birds, late in the book, in a chapter focused on fishes’ sex lives. He begins his case for piscine equality animal.structures-351x185with personal stories meant to resonate with the maximum amount of readers, including fishing at summer camp—and watching caught animals knifed in the skull—as well as his accidental shattering of a goldfish bowl in elementary school.

  Before Balcombe’s swift, effective prologue is through, he presses us to imagine just how much 100 million tons (approximately 157 billion individual fishes) amount to—for that is the estimated annual haul of commercial fisheries worldwide. These individuals die miserably from “asphyxiation by removal from water, decompression from the pressure change of being brought to the surface, crushing beneath the weight of thousands of others hoisted aboard in massive nets, and evisceration once landed.”

  Balcombe then moves into the historical essentials of the fish as an organism, how bony fishes (teleosts) ring the world with 31,000 species, and cartilaginous fish (like sharks and rays) number around 1,300. The Cambrian period, 530 million years ago, is when the first fishlike creatures appeared. Then in the Silurian, 90 million years later, these creatures developed jaws, initiating the eat-or-be-eaten cycle that led to the explosion of fish species in the Devonian period.

  Humanity has only been around for 200,000 years. We’ve explored less than five percent of the Earth’s oceans, which makes its depths a genuinely alien realm. That we should respect the fish as one of evolution’s most elegant and versatile designs—instead of ripping giant nets across the ocean floor to cull as many as possible—does not, unfortunately, go without saying. Aside from relating stories by those who live and work with fishes about the animals’ desire to be petted (the way any dog does), Balcombe tackles stereotypes about them being cold-blooded dimwits, unworthy of our moral consideration, in two main ways.

  First he describes a variety of fishes simply as they are. In doing so, we can’t help but be astonished by creatures like the flounder, who experiences the migration of one eye to the opposite side of his face prior to adulthood. This happens in conjunction with another super-power, pigment manipulation (via cells called melanophores), which helps flounders take on the coloration of their surroundings. Other fishes are so strange that, were they featured on The X-Files as monsters-of-the-week, you’d have to ask, “Who comes up with this stuff?” Here Balcombe describes the sexual parasitism of certain male anglerfishes, who are less than half an inch long,

  but what they lack in size they make up for in the sheer audacity of their mode of existence. On finding a female, males of some deep-sea anglerfish species latch their mouths onto her body and stay there for the remainder of their lives. It doesn’t matter much where they fix their bite on the female—it could be on her abdomen or her head—they eventually become fused to her. Many times smaller, the male resembles little more than a modified fin, living off her blood supply and fertilizing her intravenously. One female may end up with three or more males sprouting from her body like vestigial appendages.

  Balcombe’s other scientific sortie on fishes’ behalf is to describe their sensory world—what German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called the umwelt—and how it compares with our own. One of the biggest differences between humans and fishes is that we are trichromatic, having three types of cones in our eyes for detecting color, and they are tetrachromatic, possessing four. This allows for the detection of ultraviolet light, reflected by the faces of certain species and used by individuals to recognize each other.

  As if navigating a UV world didn’t require a miraculous kind of intelligence by itself, fishes also create mental constructs, a key component of sentience. While decision making in laboratory exams—for food rewards—fishes can be deceived optically, using both the Ebbinghaus and Müller-Lyer illusions (the former involves circles of various Ebbinghaus_illusionsizes, the latter uses lines of varying length). Our underwater cousins, infamous for their supposed three second memories, couldn’t master and/or fail a food-reward test unless they developed notions about, and then acted upon, the answers.

  Though Balcombe offers dozens of examples that illustrate awe-inspiring fish abilities on par with the human talents of writing and composing music, a few stand out. One is how some fishes smell. Salmon, sharks and eels can detect the scents of predators, prey, and their own species from absolutely minimal portions. Salmon can detect two-thirds of a drop of concentrated sea lion scent in an Olympic-size swimming pool. Eels can detect their home water using one-ten millionth of a drop. If the noses of these fishes seem astoundingly fine-tuned, evolution has a further surprise (as it usually does). It comes in the form of biogenic magnetite crystals, which certain bats and pigeons use to detect the Earth’s magnetic fields. Balcombe tells us that long-distance swimmers like sharks, eels, and tunas have

  Single cells containing microscopic magnetite crystals [that] act like compass needles. By isolating cells from the nasal passages of trouts (very close relatives of salmons) and exposing these cells to a rotating magnetic field, a research team from Germany, France, and Malaysia found that the cells themselves rotated. The magnetic particles are firmly attached to the cell membrane, and by constantly pulling toward magnetic field lines, these particles generate torque on the cell membrane when the salmon changes direction. That torque must be directly transmitted to stress-sensitive transducers of some kind, because evidence shows that the salmons can feel it.

  Notice that Balcombe doesn’t detail what “isolating cells from the nasal passages of trouts” actually entails. Perhaps it involves a non-invasive electronic scan of some kind? Judging by the author’s horrific descriptions of other tests, executed to prove that fishes can feel pain, I’m probably being naive.

  Whether or not fishes experience agony, or merely react to it like robots, is an inane bit of obfuscation meant to validate both commercial and recreational fishing the world over. Fishes, like all vertebrates, are opioid-responsive, meaning that when injured their bodies are capable of chemically dulling a fire set in the nervous system. More pointedly, doses of lab-administered morphine work on fishes after lab-administered injections of acid and bee venom cause them injury. Sadly, such tests are necessary if scientific consensus is to translate into public policy. More people love eating delicious fish, and enjoy relaxing by the lake with their rod and tackle box, than are willing to bow to the common sense that if something is alive and can make eye contact, it probably wants to be left unmolested as much as you do.

  1590677Once What a Fish Knows covers the animals’ umwelt, the bodily experience, we’re treated to the intricacies of their social and emotional realms. Balcombe relates anecdotes by fish owners whose pets grew anxious when tank mates were displaced, or when one owner himself changed his room around—and his cichlid Oscar began frequenting the other side of the tank to see him better. At a small pond in Pennsylvania, a librarian saw one fish use careful nudges to help a tilting companion stay upright.

  These behaviors are fairly intimate, and it’s not likely that scientists will ever induce them in even the coziest artificial setting. There is, however, one natural fish environment that is like a laboratory unto itself: the reef. One of Balcombe’s most dramatic examples of fish intelligence and emotion deals with cleanerfishes, who remove parasites, dead skin, and algae from the bodies of clients. These cleaners, working best and most competitively in reefs, follow exacting principles while operating what amounts to a small business. Cleaners must be fast, fair, and loyal to returning clients because their reputation is at stake. Those who nip their clients while cleaning (a fish’s coating of mucus is quite nutritious) risk being avoided.

  Some readers will learn about cleaners, lovelorn pets, and sand-decorating puffers and dismissively answer that food and sex are a fish’s prime motivator, as they are for any animal. A multitude of readers will encounter passages about vessels that dump dead by-catch (accidentally netted animals) back into the water as waste, and shrug. Yet the author maintains a patient and hopeful tone throughout What a Fish Knows, even when confronted by the devastating reality of ocean acidification and collapsing fish stocks around the world. He says,

  Knowledge is a powerful thing; it informs ethics and fuels revolutions—witness the end of colonialism and institutionalized slavery, the advancement of women’s rights, and the establishment of civil rights for African Americans. These were triumphs of reason stoked by a growing sense of moral revulsion. Injustices, be they driven by greed, narrow-mindedness, prejudice, or all three, wither in the face of informed reason. The color of one’s skin, one’s religion, or possession of a womb are simply no grounds for exploitation.

  If more people realized that plastic, mercury, and a host of other poisons get cycled through the ocean, through fishes, and back into us, maybe books like this one would become rare. As it is, retailers and libraries have entire sections dedicated to the damage we’ve done to the environment and ourselves.

  ____
  Justin Hickey is a freelance writer, and editor here at Open Letters Monthly.

• Hakai
  https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/book-review-what-fish-knows
  Word count: 589

  Book Review: What a Fish Knows
  From using tools to faking orgasms, fish can do more than most people realize.
  by Ben Goldfarb
  Published September 30, 2016
  Ask a layperson to recite one fact about fish intelligence and you might hear the old saw about the goldfish’s three-second memory. But as the ethologist and author Jonathan Balcombe explains in What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins—a delightful exploration of fish cognition, emotion, and perception—that persistent myth obscures the breathtaking capacities of our finned brethren. Tuskfish use tools, lionfish cooperate, and guppies obey social hierarchies. Frillfin gobies form complex mental maps of tide pools. Bass recognize human faces. Brown trout fake orgasms.

  Fish—with their rigid countenances, lack of grasping appendages, and inability to vocalize out of water—are easy creatures to underestimate. But Balcombe marshals an impressive body of evidence on behalf of their faculties. One enthralling chapter deals with cleanerfish, which boldly nip parasites from the mouths and gills of their “clients,” including predators such as sharks. Though it’s easy to dismiss this symbiosis as evolutionary instinct, Balcombe reveals that it’s closer to a learned cultural contract: cleanerfish can recognize more than 100 individual clients, are capable of remembering when they last groomed each one, and appease irritable customers with tender massages. “[T]he system encompasses long-term relationships built on trust, crime and punishment, choosiness, audience awareness, reputation, and brown-nosing,” Balcombe writes—not bad for reef dwellers that don’t exceed 15 centimeters.

  To some cynical readers, the notion that, say, mullet leap from the water for sheer pleasure may smack of anthropomorphism—the practice of ascribing human attributes and attitudes, like joy, to non-human beings. Perhaps the greater sin, however, is what the primatologist Frans de Waal has called anthropodenial, or “build[ing] a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.” By denying that fish learn, innovate, and emote, Balcombe argues, we rationalize their exploitation and mistreatment. As for the old debate about whether fish experience pain, well, it isn’t a debate at all—despite their lack of neocortex, the evidence that they can suffer is overwhelming.

  “The simple possibility is that fishes are individual beings whose lives have intrinsic value,” Balcombe writes. “The profound implication is that this would qualify them for inclusion in our circle of moral concern.” Although activists have expressed plenty of justifiable outrage about factory farming of pigs and cows, you don’t hear too many complaints about the anguish that fish experience when they’re bled out through the gills or suffocated on the deck of a boat.

  Balcombe stops just short of following this argument to its logical conclusion—that commercial and recreational fishing are unconscionably inhumane. And, truthfully, I’m not sure that they are: every form of food production incurs ethical and environmental costs, and what is fishing but another predator-prey relationship? Still, What a Fish Knows, which is dedicated to “the anonymous trillions,” certainly left this piscivorous angler queasy about picking up his rod. There are other ways of interacting with these marvelous animals, such as “when a grouper fish approaches a trusted diver to receive caresses.” If groupers play, morays plan, and wrasse learn, perhaps we should treat our aquatic kin with a bit more respect.

  What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
  By Jonathan Balcombe
  287 pp. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

• PETA Prime
  http://prime.peta.org/2010/04/prime-book-review-second-nature
  Word count: 976

  QUOTED: "Second Nature is Jonathan Balcombe’s second grand-slam home run (his first was Pleasurable Kingdom). Others have loaded the bases; Balcombe brings them all home. Fighting for animal rights, we do need to know who animals are if we are to include them in our sphere of moral concern. And Balcombe introduces us to a wide range of research on animal cognition, sensations, emotions, experiences, personalities, and virtues."

  Apr 22

  Prime Book Review: ‘Second Nature’
  Posted by Steve Martindale at 5:55 AM | Permalink | No Comments

  Prime Book Review: 'Second Nature' by Steve MartindaleSecond Nature is Jonathan Balcombe’s second grand-slam home run (his first was Pleasurable Kingdom). Others have loaded the bases; Balcombe brings them all home. Fighting for animal rights, we do need to know who animals are if we are to include them in our sphere of moral concern. And Balcombe introduces us to a wide range of research on animal cognition, sensations, emotions, experiences, personalities, and virtues. He demonstrates beyond any doubt that science is firmly on the side of animals, not their abusers. Roughly two-thirds of this lively book is devoted to exploring animals’ lives, which are rich and intensely felt in ways that we have only begun to understand. The final third examines how people interact with their fellow denizens on this planet. Balcombe provides new perspectives on eating meat, factory farming, vivisection, and other areas of concern. In all, this is a grand tour of animals, why we should care about them, and how we can move forward in sparing them from human mistreatment.

  The book is full of testimony to the wonderful inner life and consciousness of animals. Did you know that dolphins have names for themselves? They use personal whistles to identify each other and call each other by name. Spectacled parrotlets have names too. Their parents designate each chick and each other with unique calls, and they respond to their names when called. Humpback whales thank you when you do something nice for them. When divers freed a whale from being entangled in rope, the whale didn’t just swim away. Instead, the animal approached and nuzzled each diver. Rats and many other animals cooperate with each other and return favors. And group decisions are often democratic: Deer vote on group movements by standing up, African buffalo vote with eye signals, and whooper swans vote with head movements. These are just a handful of the many fresh insights provided in Second Nature.

  Have you ever noticed that the portrayal in the media of animals in nature tends to obsess on the relentless struggle to survive, along with the violence of predators as they take down their prey? Nature seen through that lens is indeed “red in tooth and claw.” Perhaps people inherently find that view to be entertaining—murder and violence are hardly rare in movies and on television. But Balcombe points out that this version of nature is one way that society justifies treating animals cruelly. The latent message: Institutional animal abuse is no worse than the cruelty of nature. Not true. While times of hardship do exist, animals living free in nature also spend considerable time experiencing the joy of living. Colors, songs, smells, emotions, the warmth of the sun, a cool drink of water, companionship among friends and family-life is full of pleasant experiences. And there is no reason to think that animals enjoy these sensations with any less intensity or vigor than people do. Even more so, perhaps. Dogs’ sense of smell may be a million times more sensitive than ours, for example—not a half-dead wisp of sensation, but full-throttle awareness.

  Given all of that (and much more), we turn our attention to the cruelty inflicted on animals by human hands. Sharks are relentlessly portrayed as killers to be feared and reviled, but for every human killed by a shark, people kill roughly 5 million sharks. What is the deadliest weapon ever invented? The fork. Eating meat is the single largest source of animal suffering and a great deal of human suffering as well. Meat consumption is not sustainable in a world of 6 billion people. Balcombe’s essay on these and other issues is illuminating and highly recommended.

  But we are indeed making progress. Veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages have now been banned in Europe and several U.S. states, acknowledging the intrinsic value of animal life. The E.U. officially recognizes animals as sentient, and the Dutch Party for the Animals, dedicated to the proposition that animals should be treated with respect, is gaining seats in local parliaments and is on the verge of national representation as well. Cruelty-free consumer choices are everywhere, many animal ethics and law courses are now being taught at universities, and animal rights and protection groups are quickly growing in numbers and effectiveness.

  In his book, Balcome says, “The era of our First Nature—in which we view animals as things to be used and taken for shortsighted gains—is coming to an end.” A new era is beginning, one that is ethical, based on science, and less selfish, and which grants animals the respect that they deserve. This emerging “second nature” is evolving with the speed of cultural change as we establish basic rights for sentient animals. Balcombe recalls the words of Anne Frank, and I cannot improve on them: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” That start can be as easy as making compassionate decisions with every purchase and every meal.

  You can order Second Nature through the Barnes & Noble portal in the PETA Mall and get a great book while directing badly needed funds to PETA: http://petamall.com/books.asp.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/29/second-nature-animals-jonathan-balcombe
  Word count: 649

  QUOTED: "It's a pity that the book has been packaged and priced as an academic tome; it is fascinating, well-written and consistently thought-provoking, and deserves a wide readership."

  Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals by Jonathan Balcombe
  Josh Lacey applauds a thought-provoking study of animal experience
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  Josh Lacey
  Friday 28 May 2010 19.06 EDT First published on Friday 28 May 2010 19.06 EDT

  Every year about 10 people are killed by sharks, and each death is lavishly reported on bulletins and front pages. And, every year, up to 73 million sharks are slaughtered by humans, but hardly anyone notices – apart from the sharks, of course.

  This isn't the only uncomfortable statistic in Jonathan Balcombe's Second Nature. Fifty billion land animals are killed each year to provide us with food, and probably the same number of fish; 100 million mice, rats, rabbits, monkeys, cats, dogs and birds are used and destroyed annually in American laboratories; 50 million animals are killed for fur. Against these unimaginably vast numbers, pleads Balcombe, we have to remember one simple fact: each of these animals was a sentient being. Balcombe's previous book, Pleasurable Kingdoms, described how animals enjoy themselves, from masturbating monkeys to pigs lounging in the sun. Drawing on a similarly wide range of examples, Second Nature describes how animals experience the world as sensitively and intensely as humans, if not more so.

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  We like to think of ourselves as perceptive but, compared to many animals, we are actually rather insensitive brutes, pretty much blind, nearly deaf, divorced from our environments. In all sorts of different species, Balcombe finds strong evidence for compassion, cooperation, altruism, empathy, intelligence and communication. Australian researchers, for instance, discovered that chickens have at least 30 different calls, alerting one another to the appearance of unexpected food or prowling hawks, while prairie dogs have at least 100 "words" describing predators, including different terms for humans with and without guns.

  Among his wide range of anecdotes and examples, I particularly liked the sound of Kelly, a dolphin living in the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi. There, the dolphins have been trained to clean up their own pools, by being offered treats in exchange for bringing litter to the surface and handing it over. Kelly has found her own way to trick the system: when a piece of paper falls into her pool, she sneaks it to the bottom and tucks it under a rock. When she sees a human trainer, she tears off a scrap, takes it to the surface and gets a snack in exchange, leaving the rest of the paper for next time.

  Balcombe devotes a couple of chapters to dismissing the myth that nature is a cruel and bloody place where violence lurks at every corner. Most of the time, he says, animals lead peaceful, calm and enjoyable lives. The most violent creature on the planet is, of course, us. We are "moral toddlers", he says, and, like any ordinary two-year-old, we blithely wander around our environment, chomping and stomping and shoving and breaking things without much thought for anyone else.

  Balcombe tells us that he's been a vegan for more than 30 years – and, unsurprisingly, he recommends that his readers become vegetarians – but there's a more radical message at the heart of his book. In order to heal ourselves, he suggests, we have to reform our relationships with animals; we will "live in better, more caring societies when we treat all feeling individuals with compassion and respect". It's a pity that the book has been packaged and priced as an academic tome; it is fascinating, well-written and consistently thought-provoking, and deserves a wide readership.

  Josh Lacey's Three Diamonds and a Donkey is published by Scholastic.

• New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19scibooks.html
  Word count: 1100

  QUOTED: "“The Exultant Ark” showcases surprising, funny, touching, sad, heartwarming pictures by photographers all over the world. Dr. Balcombe’s text is a serious examination of the subject of animal pleasure. ... But it also delights us along the way with Dr. Balcombe’s observations and examples."
  "It’s hard to deny that animals are not sensate to pleasure after studying these joyous photographs, and reading Dr. Balcombe’s persuasive arguments."

  The Joy of a Sun
  Bath, a Snuggle, a
  Bite of Pâté
  Books
  By KATHERINE BOUTON JULY 18, 2011
  Two ring­tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays,
  sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees
  apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are
  cigars to complete the picture.
  There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use
  the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core
  body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in
  his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly
  enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr. Balcombe can’t help
  giving the study of animal pleasure a properly scientific name: hedonic ethology.
  True to its subtitle — “A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure” — “The Exultant
  Ark” showcases surprising, funny, touching, sad, heartwarming pictures by
  photographers all over the world. Dr. Balcombe’s text is a serious examination of the
  subject of animal pleasure, a study that “remains nascent and largely neglected in
  scientific discourse.” But it also delights us along the way with Dr. Balcombe’s
  observations and examples.
  2/12/2017 ‘The Exultant Ark’ Book Review ­ Who Says Animals Don’t Enjoy Themselves? ­ The New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19scibooks.html 2/3
  On the subject of food as pleasure, for instance, he tells us, “Rats will enter a
  deadly cold room and navigate a maze to retrieve highly palatable food (e.g.,
  shortbread, pâté or Coca­Cola).” If they happen to find rat chow instead, “they
  quickly return to their cozy nests, where they stay for the remainder of the
  experiment.”
  Dr. Balcombe offers three primary arguments in support of the case that animals feel
  pleasure. First, pleasure is adaptive: Just as “pain discourages animals doing things
  that risk harm or death, which are not good outcomes in the evolutionary stakes,” he
  writes, pleasure “is nature’s way of improving survival and reproductive output.”
  Second, we know for sure that pleasure exists in at least one animal species:
  humans. As Paul Bloom writes in his brilliant book “How Pleasure Works,” some
  pleasures are “uniquely human, such as art, music, fiction, masochism and religion.”
  Further, he writes, human pleasure often derives in large part from what we think a
  thing is (a Vermeer gives more pleasure than an identical van Meegeren). Dr.
  Balcombe argues that animals may experience their own unique pleasures, “forms of
  pleasure inaccessible to humans.”
  His third argument is simply that animals are equipped to feel it. Since we know
  animals experience pain, why not pleasure?
  Sex is a pleasure that in humans clearly has some nonprocreative aspects. But
  Dr. Balcombe points out that this is true in the animal world as well. He gives
  numerous examples; one particularly racy one (not pictured) is a pair of manatees
  embracing “with each male’s penis in the other’s mouth.”
  “Love” is a term scientists are reluctant to apply to animals, preferring
  “bonding” and “attachment.” But look at the photograph (by Vicki Puluso) of two
  adult giraffes nuzzling a calf, the baby’s eyes half closed in bliss. Or a Japanese
  macaque cradling her infant (by Robert Parnell). Call it love or call it bonding, but,
  Dr. Balcombe writes, “the hormones are exactly the same in a human and a vole” —
  one of the most studied animals in the realm of emotional attachment — “and the
  evolutionary benefits align.”
  2/12/2017 ‘The Exultant Ark’ Book Review ­ Who Says Animals Don’t Enjoy Themselves? ­ The New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19scibooks.html 3/3
  Animals exhibit a variety of behaviors that certainly look like pleasure, and for
  which no evolutionary explanation seems obvious. We’ve all seen gulls or crows
  diving precariously toward the ground before swooping up at the last moment.
  “There is no obvious survival function to this behavior,” Dr. Balcombe writes, “which
  leaves me wondering if they do it simply for the thrill of speed, as a human skydiver
  might.”
  Animals also indulge in substance abuse. Drunken birds wobbling after eating
  fermented fruit is not an uncommon sight. Birds may become intoxicated
  accidentally, Dr. Balcombe says, but reputation has it that elephants deliberately get
  drunk on fermenting marula fruit. A study from the University of Bristol in England
  points out that an elephant would have to eat four times its usual meal size to be
  affected. The same researchers, however, don’t deny that elephants indeed end up
  tipsy. The explanation may be a toxin in beetle pupae found under the bark, which
  the elephants also eat.
  Every once in a while, Dr. Balcombe seems to drift a little too close to
  anthropomorphic supposition. Musing about a picture of a fledgling osprey, he
  writes, “I surmise that the feelings are similar” to those of a human “launching off a
  high aerie,” a feeling that is both “thrilling and terrifying.”
  In his conclusion Dr. Balcombe argues that an animal’s ability to experience
  pleasure is a strong factor in considering the rights of animals. “The real arbiter of
  whether or not a being deserves respect and compassion is sentience,” he writes.
  “Being sensate to pleasures and especially to pains is the true currency of ethics.” It’s
  hard to deny that animals are not sensate to pleasure after studying these joyous
  photographs, and reading Dr. Balcombe’s persuasive arguments.
  A version of this review appears in print on July 19, 2011, on Page D2 of the New York edition with the
  headline: The Joy of a Sun Bath, a Snuggle, a Bite of Pâté.

• Ecologist
  http://www.theecologist.org/reviews/books/1110526/the_exultant_ark_a_pictorial_tour_of_animal_pleasure.html
  Word count: 930

  QUOTED: "Packed with wonderful photos, Jonathan Balcombe’s book is a captivating look at animal pleasure."
  "The Exultant Ark is an enjoyable read and the images of satisfied animals in their element will leave you feeling warm inside."

  The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure
  Robert Phillips

  28th October, 2011

  Packed with wonderful photos, Jonathan Balcombe’s book is a captivating look at animal pleasure, says Robert Phillips

  Can animals feel emotions like we do; and more specifically can they feel enjoyment and pleasure? Balcombe’s oeuvre offers up page after page of glossy photos of animals taking a moment to chill out or just have a great time. The theory of anthropomorphism (attribution of human characteristics to non-humans) is hotly debated. Traditional perceptions of nature have been of a harsh and unforgiving place where animals act instinctively and purely for survival. Balcombe , however, disagrees and is a firm believer in animal happiness - even suggesting that invertebrates can experience pleasure. To make his case, he draws on a wide variety of contented animals captured on camera as well his personal experiences, which gives the book a pleasantly personal touch. From polar bears engaging in a playful romp to Tufted Titmice indulging in a relaxing spot of sunbathing; Balcombe proves that animals aren’t always engaged in a battle for survival but will frequently do things for nothing more than the feeling of satisfaction.

  The chapter on animal love was one of the most convincing and by the end of it, I had come round to the rightness of Balcombe’s way of thinking. He demonstrates the strength of the bond between mating pairs in nature but more striking is his description of the utter anguish and grief caused by the loss of a ‘loved’ one with animals displaying behaviour similar to that of a mourning human. He mentions an eight year-old chimpanzee named Flint who lost his mother and became utterly depressed; so much so that he stopped eating and eventually died three weeks later, curled up where he had found his mother’s body. And it’s not just the highly intelligent ape species that can feel pleasure (or pain) either. A surprisingly wide variety of species engage in human style sexual acts. Balcombe talks about sharks, deer, walruses, manatees and even snails turning into something more than simply a drive for replication. There is no need for caution. There are no terribly graphic photos here but there really does seem to be lots of evidence out there of animals having sex for pleasure rather than procreation. So, Balcombe asks, if animal masturbation and homosexuality are not instinctive actions born out of the survival instinct; then what reason could there be for them doing it if not pure enjoyment?

  What is clear throughout is that much of the behaviour described and photographed in this book are evolutionary aids. Tiny fox kits wrestling and playing with each other are learning hunting and social skills, crucial for their survival into adulthood. Like human children, Balcombe explains, these little ones are not deliberately training for the real world but are simply having a great time messing about with one another. The same goes for sweet food. Individuals who prefer high-energy treats will have more energy and thus a competitive edge over their sugar-loathing counterparts, They don’t know they’re doing it though; they are simply eating it because they like the taste. Pleasure is clearly a driver for evolution - thus, says Balcombe, these preferences for more enjoyable activities have been crucial in animal development, as well as our own.

  With the idea of animal happiness comes the opposite feeling of pain, and in a frank conclusion to the book, Balcombe explains how humans must treat animals with the respect they deserve. Each year we kill 60 billion land animals and a comparable number of fish – numbers that look heartless in the extreme when the thought of the pain and upset caused is taken into account. As Balcombe points out, getting your pleasure at the expense of another is a poor equation for life. Throughout history, the prejudices of greater intelligence and culture, much like those used in validating slavery and colonialism, have been used as an excuse to mistreat animals for our profit. We continue today to eradicate vast swathes of habitat every year to fuel our irrepressible consumption and if animals could articulate their plight, like we can, we would all be deafened by their voices. Upon setting out to write the book, Balcombe writes that he had ‘considered whether it should be just a feel-good book or whether it should say something more. I soon decided on the latter.’

  While The Exultant Ark is an enjoyable read and the images of satisfied animals in their element will leave you feeling warm inside, Balcombe’s purpose is to force a review of how we humans treat animals. The image of a caged Sun Bear unable even to stand up is a clear message that we have for too long wielded our supposed greater sentience and consciousness over animals in order to control them. Despite the record numbers of animal protection laws making it onto the statute books, there is still much to learn about animals and much we need to change in our treatment of them.

  The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure by Jonathan Balcombe (£24.95, University of California Press) is available from Amazon

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