Fishing gear unintentionally catches hundreds of thousands of whales, dolphins, seals, and sea turtles annually, causing drowning, injury, and entanglement suffering on a massive scale.
Marine mammal bycatch causes significant suffering through drowning, physical trauma, and stress from entanglement. Animals that survive initial capture often carry long-term injuries from line wraps around flippers or bills that restrict movement, cause infection, or eventually kill through starvation. The suffering of individual animals, combined with population-level impacts on species like the vaquita, makes bycatch reduction a major animal welfare priority. Solutions exist and are cost-effective — they simply require regulatory will and industry adoption.