Since there was apparently a need, I made a couple of images to explain why asking for veterinary advice online will often be met with silence, and why you just shouldn’t do it. Get a vet on the phone and they will tell you if you need to bring the animal in. I have tried to keep civil, but I do have very strong opinions on the topic.
I’ve heard all the excuses. I don’t care, you call your local clinic.
@why-animals-do-the-thing and anyone else who feels the need to use these images, you are most welcome to reblog, repost, reply with or otherwise use these images anywhere they will be helpful.
Having deleted way too many asks for specific pet care advice, even ‘desperately needing help’ asks it seems we are overdue for a reminder to call your vet when you have problems about your pet, not to message random people on the internet.
It is incredibly draining to get so many messages that I cannot practically answer and really should not answer. It sounds harsh, but they’re wasting my time at best and draining my resilience at worst. This goes double for tragic stories about animal death; I live and work in that world, I don’t need to read about it again as soon as I get home and I can’t filter my inbox for tags of things I don’t want to see. That’s why I make sure to tag them on the blog, so you can avoid them if you’re not up to them. But all your messages I have to read.
So please, please, when you think “I have a question for drferox” please consider “Is this a question I can or should ask my own vet”
Such a deceptively simple looking question has been hotly debated in science for decades now, with vocal advocates on both sides, but I’m pretty damn sure fish feel pain.
The crux of the ‘No’ argument is basically that while fish have nociceptors (neurons which detect pain) but they don’t connect to their neocortex like they do in mammals, so they conclude that while fish probably feel some kind of ‘fish pain’ it’s not equivalent to pain as we know it.
I, personally, am not terribly impressed by this argument. We used to say this about every non-human species on the planet and now we know better.
Stimuli that would cause pain in a human cause increased activity in the whole brain, not just the brain stem, which implies it is percieved consciously.
Fish behaviour changes when injected with something painful, but does not change if injected with both something painful and morphine. Morphine does not change the tissue damage, only how the conscious brain perceives pain.
Fish avoid painful stimuli.
So the evidence is mounting that yes, fish feel a type of pain and while it may not be 100% analogous to pain sensation in a mammal, that difference is likely academic. The fact that their behavior normalizes when given pain relief after a painful stimulus is pretty strong evidence in my professional opinion.
What we do know, without doubt, is that fish can suffer. The details of that pain don’t matter so much as their ability to suffer because of it. We can debate semantics and fine details all day, but if we have stewardship over these animals, it’s our duty to minimize their suffering wherever we reasonably can.
This isn’t exactly a scientific study, but if you watch injured fish, they act differently. They hang still in the water instead of moving with the others, they dull their colors, they clamp their fins, they try to avoid moving the injured part of them. Those aren’t good things to do, they make the injured fish a target.
Most non-domesticated animals, especially less social ones, are good at concealing pain. In addition, non-mammals don’t always express pain in ways that we automatically see as expressions of distress. It’s there, though.
(He passed 8 days before. Was there not enough time to pull the ad copy? It is from Spencer Gifts, though – maybe they thought it was a nice piece of memorabilia).
I guess it’s a little nicer when he’s sitting still..
There will always be people in the world (and more specifically, on the Internet) who would ask you to suffer perpetually. Some of them hate you; some of them hate everybody; some of them are trying to do good but they’re really bad at it.
Do not get caught up in believing that if you find all of these people and fight them hard and long enough, you can somehow earn your right to exist comfortably.
You already have that right, and you can exercise it now.
Sometimes fighting people who are wrong feels good, and sometimes it’s a good thing to do for the world, but when you find yourself saying “I can’t rest until I find the person who hates me most and force them to admit I’m allowed to rest,” it’s time to log off and just let yourself rest already.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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