Catch-and-release angling for freshwater fish raises welfare questions about stress, injury, and mortality that can be substantially reduced through better handling practices but not entirely eliminated.
Catch-and-release angling presents a welfare challenge without a clean resolution: the activity causes undeniable acute welfare harm to fish, but the harm can be substantially reduced through better practices, and recreational angling supports conservation funding and public connection to aquatic ecosystems. The welfare-reducing interventions — barbless hooks, minimal air exposure, wet hands, rapid release — are known and effective but incompletely adopted by the recreational angling community. Given the growing evidence base for fish sentience, treating catch-and-release welfare as a serious ethical consideration rather than an afterthought is increasingly defensible from a scientific standpoint.