“Fishes are not just living beings: they are individuals who have a personality and build relationships with others. They can learn, absorb information and invent new things, calm each other down and make plans for the future. They are able to enjoy, be in a playful mood, feel fear, pain and joy. They are not just intelligent, but also conscious, sociable, social, able to use communication tools, virtuous and even unprincipled creatures. The purpose of my book is to allow them to express themselves in ways that have not been possible in the past. Thanks to significant advances in ethology, sociobiology, neurobiology and ecology, we can better understand what the world looks like for the fish themselves, how they perceive it, feel and learn from their own experience. (Jonathan Balcombe)