Humane killing methods for farmed fish are an area of active development. Understanding current best practice and remaining gaps helps identify welfare improvement priorities.
Humane fish killing is an area where welfare science has advanced substantially but industry adoption lags considerably. The scientific evidence that fish are sentient and experience pain makes the use of aversive killing methods — live suffocation, CO2 immersion, or crushing in ice slurry — ethically unacceptable under any framework that takes fish welfare seriously. Yet these methods remain standard in much of global fish farming. The technological solutions exist: percussive stunning, electrical stunning, and spiking all provide effective methods appropriate to different species and production scales. The barrier is economic and cultural rather than technological — investment in stunning equipment and training requires both economic incentive and management commitment. Certification schemes and retailer standards that require pre-stunning are the most effective current levers for change.