Fish Smarts Or A Fish Tale?

Fish can be wondrous to behold and delicious to consume, but now animal rights activists are declaring that fish are smart - too smart to eat.

"They actually do better on cognition tests than do dogs and cats," says Bruce Friedrich of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Friedrich believes a fish is an intelligent individual.

As CBS News Correspondent John Blackstone reports, fish are the latest creatures adopted by PETA, a group that has campaigned against hot dogs and declared fried chicken cruel and unusual.

"Sylvia Earle, who's probably the foremost living marine biologist, she says, 'I'd no more eat a fish than I'd eat a cocker spaniel,'" says Friedrich.

But hang on. When we dove deeper into this story, catching up with Earle, we found the cocker spaniel tale wasn't quite what PETA claimed.

"Actually, I said Labrador retriever," she says, joking.

And she wasn't suggesting fish have some higher intelligence.

"The question of intelligence is a really slippery one," she says.

It's as slippery as fish themselves, which Earle no longer eats - not because they're smart, she says, but because they are disappearing as the fishing industry scours the seas with huge nets and lines.

Asked, of the fish he catches, which is the smartest, fisherman Bill Maidhof says: "I can't think of any of them that are smart - not one."

A fisherman should know which fish are thinkers.

"My mother always said, 'Don't worry, there's always more fish in the sea,'" says marine biologist John McCosker. "Unfortunately she was wrong."

McCosker hates to see fish species disappearing.

"I love fish," he says. "I love to eat fish."

And that, says McCosker, is a good reason to protect fish - better perhaps than PETA's claim that a school of fish is a place of higher learning.