The welfare harms experienced by wild fish at the point of commercial capture, and improvements available through gear modification and handling practices.
Wild fish capture welfare is arguably the largest single welfare problem globally by number of animals affected. The scale - up to 2.3 trillion fish annually - dwarfs every other welfare situation. Capture methods cause varying degrees of suffering: trawl crowding and asphyxiation; longline hook trauma and prolonged struggle; gill net entanglement and exhaustion; rapid decompression barotrauma. Most caught fish die through asphyxiation on deck. Improvements including more humane hauling speeds, on-board live-holding and stunning before killing, and gear modifications to reduce time on hooks are available but rarely implemented.