Fish welfare at the point of harvest receives far less attention than mammalian slaughter welfare despite affecting billions of individual animals annually, and improvements in stunning and killing methods can significantly reduce suffering.
Fish slaughter welfare is a scale problem of almost incomprehensible magnitude: the number of individual fish killed annually exceeds all other farmed animal categories combined many times over, yet welfare standards at slaughter are among the weakest for any food animal. The evidence that fish experience pain and stress is now sufficiently strong that the absence of welfare standards at harvest is ethically difficult to justify. The good news is that effective stunning and rapid killing methods exist and are being implemented by welfare-conscious producers. Consumer and retailer pressure for fish slaughter welfare standards is one of the highest-leverage welfare interventions available given the scale involved.