Sharks are among the least welfare-protected marine animals, facing enormous mortality from fishing and significant challenges in captive environments.
Shark welfare is poorly understood and rarely prioritized. The scale of shark mortality in fishing — 100 million annually — represents a welfare challenge of enormous magnitude even if shark sentience is uncertain. Finning causes sharks to drown slowly after return to water — a prolonged, distressing death. In captivity, obligate ram ventilators like great whites cannot survive because they must swim continuously to breathe — a fact that took multiple failed captive attempts to establish.