Weird question, right? Here’s the reason I’m asking.

Yesterday, I gave away a pair of Three Dog Night tickets by reciting lyrics to a song with an animal in the title. The song in question was Barracuda by Heart. A listener called me to explain that I was confusing listeners with the question because a fish is not, in fact, an animal.

I was a bit taken aback by this because of course a fish is an animal! Perhaps he was taking the definition of “mammal” and attributing it to the word “animal.” An honest mistake, but even when I pointed it out, he doubled down that I was wrong.

Here’s the 90-second conversation:

Just to be clear, here’s the first line of the Wikipedia page for fish:

Fish are gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish