Commercial fishing catches between one and 2.3 trillion wild fish annually, yet fish welfare at capture and during killing receives almost no regulatory attention despite growing evidence of fish sentience.
The scale of suffering in wild-caught fish is staggering. Fish caught in trawl nets experience rapid decompression (barotrauma), crush injury, and often prolonged asphyxiation. Hook-caught fish experience pain at the hook site for the entire duration of retrieval. Without pre-slaughter stunning, all wild-caught fish die slowly by asphyxiation in air or on ice. The difficulty of applying stunning methods at sea scale is real, but so is the enormous welfare toll of current practice for animals that research increasingly suggests are capable of suffering.