People doing their bit for fish and moths | Letters

Dave Morris on the collective power of research and Alastair Leake on the decline in moth populations

The efforts of campaigners to highlight important issues can often be overlooked by a historical approach that focuses on individuals, often academics or politicians. An example is in the obituary of the biologist Victoria Braithwaite (Obituary, 9 November), which asserts that “until the early 2000s everyone knew that fish do not feel pain”. But almost 20 years earlier, we had produced and started to widely distribute a leaflet called Fish Feel Pain. And of course hundreds of thousands of people were already refusing to eat fish on those very grounds.

In that same era, our group and others were campaigning on a range of other matters – such as traffic pollution, junk food, the arms trade, non-renewable energy, single-use plastics, environmental destruction – which may have seemed marginal at the time but are now acknowledged as mainstream concerns.

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