AN American zoologist has rebutted a conclusion by Scottish researchers that fish feel pain.
James Rose, a professor at Wyoming University and an angler, said that rather than proving a capacity for pain the results of the Edinburgh experiments on rainbow trout ''show a remarkable resistance to oral trauma''.
He also alleged the research used an ''invalid and misleading'' definition of pain, dealing only with nociception - unconscious responses to noxious stimuli.
Pain, he argued, was defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as purely a conscious experience, with a sensory component and a component of emotional feeling - suffering.
He claims that the paper published by Dr Lynne Sneddon of the Roslin Institute, and Drs Victoria Braithwaite and Michael Gentle of Edinburgh University's biology institute, is ''deeply flawed and does not provide any legitimate evidence that trout are capable of feeling pain''.
A previous study by Professor Rose - Reviews of Fishery Science, published in the American journal - arguing that awareness of pain depended on functions of specific parts of the brain which fish simply do not have, was widely quoted in response to the Edinburgh publication.
In new correspondence with a British scientist, Professor Lawrence Threadgold, a retired cell biologist and member of the Piscatorial Society, an angling club, Professor Rose said there were numerous problems with methods and interpretation in the Edinburgh paper.
Reacting to the professor's criticism yesterday, Dr Braithwaite said: ''Rose is using a very extreme definition of pain and suffering. What he is advocating is that only animals with a very well developed frontal cortex in the brain can consciously suffer pain.
''Therefore, the only animals that Rose is claiming can consciously suffer pain are humans, chimps, and gorillas.
''I would argue, and I am sure many others would, that many other animals that we interact with on a regular basis have a capacity for pain and suffering.
''So the absence of that structure doesn't prove that animals can't feel pain.''
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