Fish can experience everything from fear to joy, according to a new book DAVID BEBBER/THE TIMESThey know their Mozart from their Muddy Waters. And yet we kill about 17 billion of them for fun each year. Fish, according to a new book, have been unfairly dismissed as little more than swimming bouillabaisse but are in fact conscious and modestly intelligent animals with rich social lives. Jonathan Balcombe, director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy in Washington DC, has not eaten fish since finishing his PhD in animal behaviour three decades ago. In What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, which is published this week, he claims that there is a large and expanding body of scientific evidence that they are…

Source: The Times December 01, 2016 00:07 UTC