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From Vox
America’s bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling -
Fans walk past a Fanduel sports betting location at Footprint Center before Game Five of the Western Conference First Round NBA Playoffs between the Phoenix Suns and the New Orleans Pelicans on April 26, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. | Christian Petersen/Getty Images
The unfortunate consequences of the huge growth of sports betting, explained.
The United States is in the midst of a sports gambling boom, and it may be a generational policy mistake.
Anyone who has watched the Super Bowl, listened to a sports podcast, walked into an arena that has a gambling parlor, or, in my case, opened my mailbox to see direct mail from DraftKings offering “free bets” has seen the explosion in sports betting throughout the US.
That’s a recent change, and a fairly big one. For most of the 20th and 21st centuries, betting on sports was mostly limited to black-market bookies and the state of Nevada. Intermittent scandals like the 1919 Black Sox and mid-century college basketball match fixing and point shaving kept a stigma around sports gambling and convinced leagues it was better to keep the industry limited.
Laws were occasionally passed to keep sports gambling a gray- or black-market activity, including the 1961 Federal Wire Act, which banned the use of wire communications for “interstate or foreign commerce of bets or wagers … on any sporting event or contest,” and the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which functionally banned sports gambling outside of Nevada and a few other states with more limited sports betting.
Multiple intersecting threads brought the end of this decades-long regime. First, in the 2010s, the companies DraftKings and FanDuel used a legal gray area around fantasy sports’ status as a purported game of skill to rapidly grow into cultural and financial behemoths. One couldn’t bet on an actual game, but the performance of a fantasy team composed of real players was a different matter.
Second, in part due to lucrative partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel, sports leagues’ longtime aversion to legal gambling gradually reversed as owners and commissioners saw the potential for a new revenue stream. (In 1991, NBA Commissioner David Stern testified in front of Congress vehemently opposing legalized sports betting. Twenty-three years later, his successor, Adam Silver, wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting.”)
Finally, the emergence of internet and offshore gaming companies allowed unregulated gambling to proliferate among Americans with the technical know-how to access the sites and skirt payment restrictions.
As all this was happening, New Jersey had been on a quest to challenge PASPA, the 1992 gambling ban, in federal court. When the Supreme Court finally heard the state’s challenge and invalidated PASPA in 2018, there were sports leagues, states, and a well-heeled industry ready to take advantage of the opening. Since then, more than 30 states have legalized sports betting in some form, with over 20 allowing gambling by mobile phone.
New Jersey, the state that brought the suit to the Court, has seen sports bets rise from $1.2 billion in 2018 to $10.9 billion in 2022; a forthcoming study by Rutgers estimates 13 percent of the state now qualifies for a gambling problem.
That increase is an indication of how sudden and consequential the legalization of gambling has been — and why it’s not a policy shift we should be celebrating.
The dire consequences of the sports gambling boom, explained
The common-sense argument for legalized sports gambling is on its face reasonable. If gambling is going to happen anyway, states should tax it and regulate it. Advocates also argue that it’s a matter of individual freedom: If I enjoy gambling and I’m not hurting anyone, why can’t I do this? Let people live a little.
But the choice to legalize sports gambling hasn’t been so simple. First, implicit in this argument is that the amount of sports gambling is fixed, and that it’s simply being moved from the untaxed, unregulated black market to the revenue-generating legal market.
The entire point of the industry’s legalization push, though, is that it massively expands the pool of potential customers. Many casual sports fans aren’t going to learn the cumbersome methods needed to bet at an offshore sportsbook, but they will download an app being hawked on TV by Wayne Gretzky or Barry Sanders that’s in their phone’s app store.
The result has been an explosion in gambling. And based on the research we have, the harm such widespread adoption has caused is not trivial. With the United States’s boom so recent and therefore data somewhat sparse, the United Kingdom is a useful comparison. It has had a legalized and regulated system for over 15 years, one that includes not just sports but casino gambling.
An extensive report by Bloomberg cataloged the harms since legalization: Sixty percent of industry profits come from the top 5 percent of users; the industry, supposedly regulated, has an estimated 36,000 children addicted to it; the government estimates 8 percent of suicides are gambling related.
In 2016, the situation was already so bad that the co-founder of Paddy Power, an industry leader, resigned from the company’s board while “fighting back tears” because he believed he was complicit in an immoral industry, Bloomberg reported.
None of this would be a surprise to experts in addictive industries. Mark Kleiman, the late public policy professor who advised states legalizing marijuana, frequently brought up the “80/20 rule” — that 80 percent of most industries’ profits come from its top 20 percent of users.
The public interest is in the provision of alcohol, cannabis, gambling services to people — adults — who use them responsibly and harmlessly. … The commercial interest is in finding those people with problems and in making as many of them as possible. If you’re in the alcohol business, you’re in the alcoholism business. They all have these signs that say ‘drink responsibly’; that means ‘please put us out of business.’ It’s not responsible drinkers that build breweries.
The same logic applies to sports betting. It’s not casual gamblers that will expand these companies’ profits, it’s the addicts. In New Jersey, “About 5% of all sports bettors placed nearly half of all bets and spent nearly 70% of the money,” wrote Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers, in the Conversation.
Proponents of legalization would argue that these kinds of arguments could apply to drugs, whether marijuana or alcohol, and yet momentum has been toward destigmatizing those substances.
But there’s a key difference. The war on drugs has meant that millions of people have been convicted for drug-related crimes. Those people are imprisoned, gain lifelong felony convictions that scar their employability, and destroy families.
By contrast, there was no war on gambling. The harm involved in sports gambling’s illegality was mostly roadblocks to gamblers and lost tax revenue. According to the National Incident-Based Reporting System used by the FBI, there were 893,682 drug offenses reported in the United States in 2021. There were 504 betting/wagering offenses. Sports gambling was functionally already a decriminalized activity.
The relentless search for more and more consumers
These sorts of arguments can sound conservative, even Puritan: “Gambling is an unvirtuous activity we ought to discourage.” But there’s a progressive, even leftist angle to this.
Science fiction author Ted Chiang told Ezra Klein in 2021 that he believed “most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.”The same is true here, in that gambling isn’t per se the problem; someone making a bet with a friend over their rival teams isn’t immoral, and a fantasy league with a buy-in isn’t sinful.
But in today’s United States, every policy decision opening up sectors to the markets ends up a maximal one, and companies preying off what ought to be casual fun will now saturate every television market, every piece of stadium advertising real estate, in an attempt to turn non-gamblers into casual gamblers, casual gamblers into regulars, and regulars into addicts. (For its part, the gaming industry has repeatedly emphasized the harms of offshore gambling and pointed out its own industry-led initiatives toward responsible gaming.)
Here’s the thing: A multinational profit-making industry and responsible gambling by customers are mutually exclusive. This is not hypothetical. The specific event that spurred Stewart Kenny, the Paddy Power co-founder, to resign from the board of directors was learning that “senior managers shelved a safer gambling campaign it was running in Australia because it had proved too effective and was costing them money.” This is exactly what Kleiman and other scholars would have predicted.
Every possible customer vein will be mined. The University of Colorado at Boulder in 2020 signed a $1.6 million partnership with a gaming company that included $30 for every new bettor the University recruited, an obvious play at signing up college students even though the legal gambling age in Colorado is 21. (The $30 incentive was discontinued in 2023 after negative press.)
The Gaming Society, a “betting education platform,” markets itself to women by promoting the opportunity to “prope[l] women’s sports forward through sports betting.” Its tagline? “Bet on women.”
Big week for GS!
Our founders @jmessler & @KevinGarnett5KG hosted our first ✨ Betting Academy Experience to teach sports betting through real-life events
As anyone who watched the Super Bowl can tell you, there’s something unsavory about the direction this takes our society.
The United States is never going to be Vatican City, but it’s hard not to be a little queasy at public universities emailing students to “place your first bet (and earn your first bonus),” as the New York Times reported Louisiana State University doing, or Texas Christian University partnering with a casino as a “presenting sponsor” for its stadium’s new collection of VIP suites. The speed and intensity with which the gaming industry has swung state governments and public universities illustrate how difficult it will be to trust local legislators to stand up to and rigorously regulate the industry.
Financialized industries under modern, liquid capitalism will never be happy with small-time brands earning modest profits. DraftKings has already gone through a reverse merger with a Bulgarian tech firm and a special-purpose acquisition company. Fanduel was acquired by Paddy Power, that European sports betting giant whose co-founder resigned.
And what about the tax argument? Maybe legalized sports gambling does have a negative side, but the benefits toward various worthy state initiatives are worth it.
The first problem is that government revenue really doesn’t work this way. Revenue is fungible: As soon as legislators see a service being funded by one source, it’s a green light to cut its funding from elsewhere. State lotteries, for instance, were widely created with claims that the revenue would bolster, say, education. But instead of that lottery money being added on top of existing education funding, it often ended up replacing it, as state revenue could be diverted elsewhere. Many states have worse education crises than before lotteries were instituted.
To put it another way, states can raise revenue whenever they want, through whatever means they want. If more money is needed for a particular state service, it can be raised through any type of tax.
It’s also a conceptually odd use of a sin tax, considering that the entire point of one is to discourageactivities that are damaging to public or societal health. Alcohol and tobacco taxes artificially raise the market price of those goods because higher prices curb alcohol and tobacco use.
But here, the logic is reversed, and we are intentionally expanding the amount of gambling and gambling addiction in order to juice state revenue numbers.
Gaming out the future
Unfortunately, the horse is likely very far out of the barn. These industries are already huge lobbying players, and there’s very little historical precedent for re-criminalizing liberalized industries. The United States’s expansive First Amendment rights will likely make advertising restrictions difficult to pass, as with prescription drugs.
That said, some steps are available around the edges. Massachusetts banned all college advertising of sports betting, for instance. To a cynic, though, there’s something farcical about this now out-in-the-open and legal industry being “regulated” with bills that would, for instance, require a pop-up message about responsible gambling every 10 wagers.
A strange irony of all this is that sports gambling is not the most profitable, or addictive, industry in this sector. Oddsmaking is a skill; bookmakers can set the odds incorrectly or simply get unlucky and have to pay out considerable winnings.
Which is why, as the Timesreports, the end goal is full “casino” gambling on your phone — slot machines, roulette, and so on. The industry has tried to rebrand this as iGaming, with the chief executive of DraftKings telling lawmakers at a conference: “It is time for your state to add iGaming … Not in the future, but now.”
One policy error has already been made across much of the United States. It’s not too late to prevent another one.
What is life? Scientists still can’t agree. -
This bird is just as confused at the definition of life as we humans are. | Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
Science writer Carl Zimmer explains why this question has been so hard to answer.
We know life when we see it. Flying birds are clearly alive, as are microscopic creatures like tardigrades that scurry around in a single drop of water.
But do we, humans, know what life fundamentally is? No.
“No one has been able to define life, and some people will tell you it’s not possible to,” says New York Times columnist and science reporter Carl Zimmer onUnexplainable— Vox’s podcast that explores big mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown.
It’s not for a lack of trying. “There are hundreds, hundreds of definitions of life that scientists themselves have published in the scientific literature,” says Zimmer, who wrote about them in his book Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. They include everything from simple definitions like “Life is a metabolic network within a boundary” to sentences that seem to require a PhD to decipher: “Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last common universal ancestor and includes all its descendants.”
There’s no consensus definition, but still the question teases us. It feels like it should be easy, something a fifth grader ought to be able to answer for science homework.
“It does feel like it should be easy because we feel it,” Zimmer says. “Our brains are actually tuned to recognizing things like biological motion. We’re sort of hardwired for recognizing life. But that doesn’t actually mean that we know what it is.”
But it still might be essential to answer. “Like imagine astronomers not agreeing on the definition of a star,” Zimmer says. “But this is even more fundamental. This is life.”
The problem is, for every definition of life, there’s a creature or perplexing life-like entity that just sends us right back to the drawing board.
I spoke to Zimmer about why it has been so damn hard to define life, and whether it might not be possible to define it at all.
(This conversation is pulled from the third episode in a series all about how life began on Earth. Check out the whole series here.)
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Resnick
So what’s wrong with the NASA definition of life, or any of the hundreds of others that exist?
Carl Zimmer
There are lots of edge cases where things get really hard, so then people start arguing about who gets to be in the club.
Brian Resnick
I know one of the most famous ones are viruses. Can you explain why viruses have been just so confounding? Are they alive? Are they not alive?
Carl Zimmer
So in some ways, viruses just seem incredibly alive. We’re talking during a pandemic — there are who knows how many copies of SARS-CoV-2 that have been produced over the past few years through reproduction.
Not only that, but those viruses mutate. Some of those mutations make them better at certain jobs. It’s made of genes. It’s made of protein.
I mean, what more do you want? It seems alive to me, right?
Brian Resnick
Yeah, that seems alive!
Carl Zimmer
But you might say no because if what’s really important to you is metabolism, you know, eating stuff, well, viruses don’t do it. Viruses don’t have any way of taking in molecules and fashioning those molecules by themselves into new molecules. They don’t have a mouth, they don’t have a stomach, they don’t have enzymes, they don’t have any of that.
All they have are basically instructions that reprogram a cell. And that cell, not the virus, makes new viruses.
Brian Resnick
You mentioned that NASA definition, “life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” So viruses check Darwinian evolution, they’re a chemical system, but they’re not self-sustaining.
Carl Zimmer
Right, right.
Brian Resnick
So if viruses aren’t alive, what are they?
Carl Zimmer
I don’t know. It would be weird to say that they’re dead because, by definition, they’d have to be alive first to be dead.
Would you say they’re inert or inanimate? Well, I don’t know.
Something that can go through such dramatic changes, but also be passing genes down through the generations — to say that that has nothing to do with life, just … it feels weird.
Brian Resnick
What’s the problem if we expand the definition to include viruses? Why does that make people unhappy?
Carl Zimmer
Well, you know, one issue is where do you stop?
Brian Resnick
If you have a more expansive definition of life, what else could be considered alive?
Carl Zimmer
Red blood cells are an interesting example.
If I took all your red blood cells out of you, you’d be dead. Done. These cells have lots of proteins inside of them that do lots of important jobs, particularly getting oxygen from your lungs and ferrying it around your body.
So here are these things, they have boundaries like living things do, they carry out complicated biochemical jobs.
People will talk about the lifespan of red blood cells. They basically are only around for a few months in your body. So you’d think that something that has a lifespan is alive.
What are these things? Are they alive or not? They have some of the characteristics of life, some really important ones, but they’re totally missing one of these really central ones.
Brian Resnick
The central one being?
Carl Zimmer
Genes. Red blood cells have no genes. There’s no way for them to grow and divide and replicate, that’s it.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A seal, blissfully unaware of the head-spinny reality of life being very hard to define.
Brian Resnick
To sum up, what’s the case that red blood cells are alive distinct from us?
Carl Zimmer
That’s interesting that you would say that — “distinct from us.” Do things have to be distinct from you to be alive?
Brian Resnick
Oh, I have no idea.
Carl Zimmer
Well, think about this. So there are some kinds of insects — like cicadas, for example — that grow special organs inside their bodies where certain kinds of bacteria live inside the cells.
These bacteria are vital to these cicadas. They will make certain kinds of amino acids for the insects that the insects can’t get from eating plants.
These bacteria in turn get lots and lots of food from the cicadas. And they cannot live outside of the cicadas. They are chemically incapable of surviving.
They have their own genes. So they can grow and replicate, but they’re not distinct. They actually have to be inside of cicada cells. So they are as merged with them as you can imagine.
Are they alive? Well, you know, I think you can make the case, but you can’t. If one of your rules is all “it has to be distinct,” then I don’t think they meet that.
Brian Resnick
Those bacteria sound a little virus-like.
Carl Zimmer
Viruses are a lot more alive in a way than these bacteria. These bacteria get passed down from mothers to their offspring. They’re not floating around.
We ourselves are resident to some former bacteria. Two billion years ago, our single-celled ancestors formed a union with these oxygen-consuming bacteria. They became these little squishy things inside of our cells called mitochondria, which generate our fuel. We take out our mitochondria, we’re dead.
They still have a few genes left inside them. But you will never see mitochondria busting out of a cell and just crawling off by themselves. They can’t do it. They can’t. They don’t have the means to survive.
Brian Resnick
So are the bacteria in the cicadas alive and our mitochondria not alive?
Carl Zimmer
Another way to talk about it is to say, well, they’re involved in the process of living.
Brian Resnick
Okay, so red blood cells and mitochondria might not be alive, they’re “involved in the process of living.” But are there also examples of things that definitely seem alive, no arguments, but still confuse definitions of life?
Carl Zimmer
My favorite one is this fish called the Amazon molly.
This is a fish. It looks completely innocuous. You would not look twice as this tiny little fish darts around in streams in Mexico and the Southern United States. It evolved several hundred thousand years ago when two other species of molly interbred and they produced a hybrid. And now that hybrid, the Amazon molly, only produces daughters. They’re all female, and they only produce daughters who are clones of themselves.
However, if you just keep an Amazon molly by itself, or a whole tankful of Amazon mollies by themselves, they will not reproduce. The reason being that they actually still have to mate with a male from one of those ancestral species.
Brian Resnick
So the Amazon molly needs a sexual partner to reproduce, but it doesn’t actually reproduce with them. It’s just reproducing with itself.
Carl Zimmer
This is a species that cannot reproduce within itself. It needs to go and find a male of another species of fish. The sperm triggers this process of its eggs starting to develop. But that female Amazon molly destroys the sperm and all of the genes inside of it. It’s like, thank you very much. I’m on my way. And then once it’s been able to mate with a male fish from another species, it then just makes a whole bunch of clones of itself. So biologists call them sexual parasites.
Brian Resnick
There’s a funny head-spinny thing here because that also sounds like what the virus does. But the virus isn’t alive. It needs another host to create more copies of its exact self. But the virus seems so different from a fish that swims around.
Carl Zimmer
Right. Exactly. They are both sort of taunting us in the same way. It’s a fish. Of course it’s alive, of course. But when you actually try to put into words what it means to be alive, the Amazon molly and things like it can get you all tangled up.
Brian Resnick
I’m seeing why this simple question — what is life — has been so hard to answer. What are the words that puts you and me in the same box but keeps the red blood cells and viruses out and Amazon mollies in.
I can see the language problem of drawing that circle around all that.
Carl Zimmer
We’re trying to draw these circles and maybe that’s part of the problem. This is more a philosophical problem than a scientific one. Philosophers have been thinking about these issues for quite a while. A very simple way of trying to understand this problem and perhaps one solution is instead of life, say like, well, what’s a game?
If you try to come up with some totally sharp circle definition of games, you’re gonna fail.
Do games have to involve cards? Well, they can, but they can also involve tokens like in Monopoly. Do you make money playing games? Well, certain games, yes. And others you have to pay to play them. Do you have to win in a game? Well, sometimes.
But you never have a child go to a toy store and go to the game section and be like, “What is this? I don’t understand.”
What [philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein said was that games are these things that have family resemblances, so they’re all connected in this sort of network of related meaning.
Brian Resnick
Yeah, that feels so wishy-washy, though. Like red blood cells all in the same family as wombats and giraffes. I don’t know.
Is this something we actually need to do as humans? Decide what life is?
Carl Zimmer
Well, again, it really depends on who you talk to.
So there will be people who will say, we really do need a definition of life for scientific purposes. So NASA can have some idea of what they’re doing, for example.
We need a definition of life for legal purposes. You know, because everyone’s shouting about quote-unquote when life begins.
There are all these situations where we really need clear-cut definitions of life.
But there are other people who say a definition of life is absurd and a waste of time. There’s a philosopher named Carol Cleland who has said this is like alchemists defining water in 1500. That’s a waste of time [without understanding molecules and atomic structure]. These molecules are composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and the way that they bond leads to all sorts of different behaviors that we know of for water.
Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t there when it came to chemistry. He would pull his hair out trying to understand what water is. He would write in his journals like, “I don’t know, like, you know, it’s different colors. It has different tastes. It’s like, what is this thing?” He was banging his head against the wall. We happen to live at a time where a theory of chemistry is pretty well worked out so we can understand water, whereas we’re not there yet for life.
Brian Resnick
Without having a solid theory of life … does that complicate our search for it in space? Might we find something that looks totally unlike the life we have on Earth?
Carl Zimmer
If we could find another form of life somewhere else, that would just change the game profoundly, and maybe we would have to step back and say, okay, what’s our theory to explain life both on Earth and off on Alpha Centauri or wherever.
[But] I would not be surprised at all if our first encounter with something that seems like life just leaves us completely baffled.
My year as a pescatarian did more harm than good -
Fish caught in a net in Poland. People catch or farm billions of fish for food each year. | Andrew Skowron/We Animals Media
Pescatarians are responsible for many more animal deaths than regular meat eaters.
When I decided to stop eating animals for ethical reasons five years ago, I wanted to make sure I could stick with it. Following a path where, I thought, each step brought me closer to the most moral diet, I became a pescetarian first, swapping chicken quesadillas and beef burgers for salmon poke bowls. This went on for a year before I adopted a fully vegetarian diet.
Pescetarianism — the practice of eschewing red meat and poultry but still eating seafood — is oftenrecommended to people who want to make better food choices, but don’t want to go vegan or vegetarian. Fishing typically has a smaller carbon footprint than factory farming, fish are often seen as less worthy of compassion than land animals, and, while wild-caught fish lives are cut short, at least they don’t spend their entire existence in cages so small they can’t turn around, like some factory-farmed animals. Many people ease into thinking and acting more critically about what (or who) they’re eating this way, which is something we should laud in a society that eats billions of animals raised in terrible conditions without giving it much thought.
Nearly a quarter of Americans report that they’re trying to eat less meat, motivated more by concern for the environment than for animal welfare. This matches my experience: saying that you’ve stopped eating animals because of concern for the animals themselves tends to provoke more hurt feelings and tense conversations than citing health or environmental reasons. And switching from an omnivorous diet to a pescetarian one is likely to reduce your climate impact because on average, seafood production releases less carbon per pound of meat than raising land animals (though there is huge variance depending on the species).
But even though I shrank my carbon footprint by going pescetarian, I now think I was actually doing more harm to animals during my year of fish than when I was just a regular omnivore.
For one thing, scientists have amassed evidence over the past 20 years that fish are sentient — that they feel pain, experience emotions, and engage in complex social behavior that we once thought was limited to humans and land animals — upending decades of received wisdom that they don’t matter morally because they can’t really suffer.
Then there’s the question of numbers. Even if you’re less confident that fish can suffer like as pigs or cows, or you just have less empathy for them, keep in mind that you typically have to eat many more individual fish to get an equivalent serving of food. An average farmed salmon yields just under four-and-a-half pounds of meat. That’s over 30 times less meat than a single pig and over 100 times less than a cow. Salmon and chickens produce a similar amount of meat per animal, and both experience intense suffering on industrial farms, but farmed salmon live roughly 26 times longer than chickens before reaching slaughter weight, which means 26-fold more time spent in pain. And unlike farmed land animals, lots of the fish we eat are carnivorous, so they eat a huge number of bait fish before they make it to your plate, which only adds to the pescetarian’s moral bill.
When I went pescetarian, I started eating around two pounds of salmon a week, the equivalent of one to two entire Atlantic salmon every month. The typical farmed salmon is fed 147 fish over the course of their short lives — which meant that I was responsible for somewhere between 1,700 and 3,500 fish deaths per year from eating salmon alone. By comparison, the typical American eats around 25 land animals in total per year (based on data from a decade ago, but current figures are similar).
So it’s little surprise that, according to one estimate, humans catch or farm at least 840 billion to 2.5 trillion fish each year — at least 11 times the combined number of cows, chickens, and pigs slaughtered globally, even though seafood makes up just 17 percent of the world’s animal protein intake.
These numbers are expected to increase — even more so if more consumers change how they’re eating to primarily help the climate, without worrying too much about animals. There’s a well-known trade-off here: a diet of small animals like chicken or anchovies instead of large ones like cows has a smaller carbon footprint but results in suffering and death for a far greater number of individual animals.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way out of this dilemma, one that is better for both animals and the climate: instead of swapping one animal for another, eat fewer animals of any species and more plants.
Our weird relationship with fish
While I’ve never had any interest in hunting, I grew up fishing with my grandfather in the Florida Keys. When I was a boy, I remember watching with concern as he beat a fish to death with the handle of a knife. “Fish don’t feel pain,” he assured me. The fish’s writhing around on the prep table suggested otherwise, but hey, I thought, he knows a lot more about fish than I do.
It’s hard to imagine this being seen as normal in the context of, say, hunting a deer, and hunting itself is a more culturally contentious activity than fishing. Americans are more disapproving of hunting than fishing, according to a 2019 survey conducted by hunting and fishing advocates.
The same goes for how we raise the animals we eat. While we routinely treat land animals on factory farms in unconscionable ways, we tolerate even worse treatment of fish. Wild-caught and farmed fish are routinely left to suffocate in open air or killed by a combination of suffocation and being cut open alive. Fish aren’t covered by the US Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, so they get essentially no protection from cruelty. It’s much less likely consumers would tolerate the routine slaughter of chickens via drowning, which the US government at least nominally prohibits (although this still happens in poultry slaughterhouses).
To take one extreme example: there’s a Japanese culinary tradition called ikizukuri — roughly translated to “prepared alive” — where sashimi is prepared from the body of a still-living fish right in front of the customer. Can you imagine a Manhattan restaurant carving off the flank of a squealing pig right in the middle of the dining room?
Of the animals we eat, fish and other seafood — a term that, really, says it all about how we view aquatic life — get the least moral consideration. Why? As Vox’s Kenny Torrella writes: “They live underwater, so we rarely interact with them. They can’t vocalize or make facial expressions, so it’s much harder to understand them than mammals and birds. And research has shown that the further animals are from us on the evolutionary chain, the less likely we are to try to protect them.”
The shifting consensus on fish pain
Our evolutionary distance from fish has contributed to the now-debunked myth that, as my grandfather believed, they don’t experience pain. The most common biological argument against fish pain went something like: humans experience pain in the brain’s neocortex, but fish don’t have a neocortex. Therefore, fish can’t experience pain.
Becca Franks, a professor of environmental studies at NYU, counters this argument with the example of the octopus. Humans need their visual cortex to see, but octopuses don’t have a visual cortex. That doesn’t mean they can’t see — it just tells us that they process vision differently. Vastly disparate animal species have independently developed vision with different eye and brain structures, in a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. The same thing has been found in birds, who were once thought to lack intelligence but are now acknowledged by neuroscientists to have developed capacities that are strikingly similar to humans. (Scientists are still learning about the extraordinary abilities of crows, for example, who can create tools to retrieve food). We should expect functions that provide animals with an edge in survival, like vision and logic, to arise in different species independently.
Similarly, there’s an evolutionary incentive for animals to develop the ability to detect and avoid pain. Donald Broom, a professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, has argued that pain and fear systems in animals evolved a long time ago and are unlikely to have suddenly appeared in just mammals or humans.
In 2002, around the time my grandfather first taught me to fish, zoologist Lynne Sneddondiscovered nociceptors — neurons that react to potentially painful stimuli — in fish. While we can’t exactly ask fish if they feel pain, Sneddon and other researchers have devised clever ways of getting to an answer. To distinguish reflexive behavior from behavior that can best be explained by a subjective experience of pain, a common approach is to look at how painful stimuli affect fish behavior, like by making them avoid predators or novel objects, with and without the presence of painkillers like morphine or aspirin.
To take one example, when zebrafish are presented with the choice between a tank enriched with things like pebbles and fake plants or a barren tank, they’ll consistently choose the former. Their preference persists when they’re injected with noxious acetic acid (vinegar). But when the barren chamber is filled with a painkiller and the enriched chamber isn’t, the zebrafish will prefer the barren chamber.
Fish form surprisingly complex social bonds
Some researchers, like Franks, think the fish pain debate is missing the point. Rather than getting bogged down with contrived experiments, they argue, we should look more closely at fish behavior in their native environments, where they show clear evidence of sentience and express preferences. As Franks told me the relevant question is, “Are those preferences more than just reflexes, and instead felt experiences, felt emotions, and strong desires about the conditions of their life?” She firmly believes that all conscious creatures have evolved to enjoy the process of survival and that prey species may even get a thrill from evading predators.
While Sneddon has focused a lot of her efforts on determining if fish can feel pain, when I spoke to her, she, too, was quick to point to broader evidence of fish sentience, which she defined as an animal’s ability to form relationships both within and across species. She cited the example of moray eels teaming up with grouper fish to form a hunting relationship, one in which the eels use their flexible, slender bodies to flush prey out of hiding places for the speedier grouper to catch. When teamed up, each predator gets to keep the kill about half the time.
One thing that first convinced me to stop eating sea creatures was a 2018 talk on the inner lives of fish by Franks. She pointed out that even tiny fish exhibit surprisingly complex social behavior. Take the cleaner wrasse fish, which eats parasites off of larger fish. Occasionally, they’ll eat a scale off that big fish by mistake, and to “apologize” to them, they’ll give a literal back rub, providing extra attention to predatory fish. All this in a fish less than six inches long!
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A tiny cleaner wrasse fish cleans a yellow-margined moray in the Indian Ocean.
Cleaner wrasse fish who see their reflection will attempt to remove marks on their scales, joining a small handful of species in passing a self-recognition test. These fish also outperform three primate species, including orangutans, in a foraging task requiring advanced social intelligence, which may help explain their delicate masseuse sensibilities.
These capacities should have profound implications for all the ways we interact with fish, from sport-fishing to scientific research, but by far most of our interactions with fish are with the ones we eat. And the suffering we cause in those interactions is incalculable.
The terrible lives of the fish we eat
Consumers getmixedmessages about whether farmed or wild-caught fish are better for the environment. The reality is complicated — it depends a lot on the species, harvest method, and location — giving rise to byzantine resources designed to help consumers make sustainable seafood choices. But it’s tough to even confirm where the fish on your plate came from: a 2015 analysis of salmon in a variety of US restaurants and groceries found that 43 percent was mislabeled — typically falsely claiming it was wild-caught when it was in fact farmed.
Given the overwhelming evidence for fish sentience, the ethically motivated eater can rely on neither. And the distinction between farmed and wild-caught begins to break down when you consider the close relationship between commercial fishing and aquaculture, also known as fish factory farming. Over 90 percent of all fish humans slaughter are wild-caught, but about half of those are eaten not by humans but processed into fishmeal (mostly eaten by farmed fish and crustaceans) to accommodate the rapidly growing fish farming industry. A recent study estimated that the number of fish farmed globally grew ninefold in the last three decades, up to 124 billion in 2019.
Raising fish in confined conditions far different from their natural environments presents severe ethical problems, to say the least. Farmed fish suffer from overcrowding, disease, and the pain of being forced to grow rapidly. They experience significantly higher mortality rates than those of farmed land animals, while diseases that spread in dense fish farms also threaten wild marine populations.
Eating wild-caught fish — assuming you can actually be sure that’s what you’re getting — may be less bad from an animal welfare perspective than eating farmed ones. As brutal as standard capture and slaughter methods for wild fish are, they inflict a few hours of suffering instead of the months or years it takes to raise animals on farms.
But commercial fishing creates plenty more externalities that go beyond the fish consumers directly eat. Ecosystem destruction is practically baked into its business model. Common fishing techniques like bottom trawling — dragging a large net across the sea floor — can cause severe damage and pollution. Fishing boats inadvertently catch many marine animals — like dolphins, whales, and turtles — known as bycatch, a category that includes about 10 percent of wild-caught fish, according to Our World in Data. Animals caught as bycatch are then tossed back, but most don’t survive.
Selene Magnolia/We Animals Media
Swordfish caught as bycatch in Greece on a fishing vessel.
I’d be remiss not to mention shrimp, which are by far the most numerous individual animal species Americans eat, at over 120 per person per year on average. We have less evidence of shrimp sentience, but this is mostly due to our lack of research on it. Shrimp do respond differently to noxious stimuli when given painkillers, providing some evidence for their ability to experience pain. And shrimp farming involves some of the most horrifying routine practices, like eye ablation — the removal of eyestalks to induce female shrimp to spawn. Because so many individual shrimp need to be killed to make one serving of food, even a small chance that they’re sentient convinced me to stop eating them. Plus, trawling for wild shrimp has the highest bycatch rate in the commercial fishing industry — more than half of the animals caught are discarded.
Individual versus systemic change is a false choice — we need both
But is individual dietary change the right thing to focus on, rather than systems-level change? This is a long-running debate on complex consumer issues like animal welfare and climate mitigation, but it’s always been an unhelpful binary. We need both. Many of the most effective animal welfare organizations focus on changing corporate and state actors to improve conditions for large numbers of animals at once. Reducing your own consumption of animal products also has a real, positive impact on animals and the environment. After accounting for bycatch and feed fish, the typical American is responsible for the deaths of between roughly 340 and 560 sea animals per year. That’s a lot of lives you could save by simply leaving fish off your plate.
Our individual choices can also have a social contagion effect — merely telling a recently converted pescetarian friend I was working on this piece convinced him to stop eating fish.
In recent years, animal advocates have begun to turn their attention to this long-ignored group and lobby for welfare reforms to how we farm and catch fish. Two new organizations are dedicated to improving the lives of the aquatic animals we eat: the Fish Welfare Initiative and the Aquatic Life Institute. This area is so neglected that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, from changing tank color to reduce salmon aggression in farms to using more humane slaughter methods.
While writing this story, I’ve marveled at how much more fascinating and complex fish are than I originally thought. Our growing understanding of the sentience of other species has made it harder to identify ways in which humans are unique. Rather than diminish my view of humanity, this research motivates me to respect the unique preferences and experiences of nonhuman animals.
One area where I think humans remain unique is in our moral agency — our ability to make choices based on a notion of right and wrong. It’s uniquely human to construct massive industrial aquaculture operations and suffocate fish by the billions — but it’s also uniquely human to refuse to participate.
Garrison Lovely is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist with work in BBC Future, New York Focus, Jacobin, and Current Affairs. He appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning and hosts the podcast The Most Interesting People I Know. He tweets from @garrisonlovely.
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