ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the anthropomorphism of fishy-human practices. It considers both the law and biology, but the chapter focuses on practices, and especially on the lively practices in which farmed fish, sentient or otherwise, come into being in tanks and pens. In human-salmon legal practices in Europe, fish have been made sentient, though twenty years ago they were not. Earlier EU legislation was picked up in the 2006 Norwegian regulations on slaughtering, which provide that fish should be killed quickly and stunned and perhaps sedated before being slaughtered. Most of the science work compares and contrasts fish by using attributes that are also human. In practice, human attributes are enacted as a yardstick for fishy cognitive and affective competences; physiological, hormonal and behavioural changes; and the neuroanatomical similarities and differences preferred by authors such as Rose. If there are many versions of fishy sentience and non-sentience, then this opens a space for enacting alternative fish-human relations.
