[s0ulphire]

Not to detract from your overall point, which I agree with, but I'd like to clarify "it's still moving" =/= alive. I grew up in a coastal town in Australia so fished a heck of a lot, you can completely sever the head and the body can still "swim" or move around for quite a while - especially in salt water.

This seems to be why the 3rd step is necessary in Ike Jime even after crushing the fish's brain.

As a side note too, my personal opinion would be that thinking of fish as feeling pain in the same way we do, is anthropomorphizing them too much. I've seen fish missing half their body see some food float past and still try to swim after it and eat it. They clearly don't have the same capacity to process incoming signals as we do, nor does that processing result in anything close to the same cognitive stress. A man cut in half wouldn't worry about food no matter how hungry he might be.

To take the absurd extreme example, I wonder how much "suffering" I'm inflicting on the worms or insects that I put on the hooks.