Sharks face significant welfare threats from bycatch, finning, and targeted fishing, with individual suffering largely invisible in conservation discussions.
Shark welfare in fisheries contexts is a welfare issue that conservation advocacy has not fully engaged with. Conservation discussions focus on population decline and ecological disruption, which are critical concerns, but the welfare of individual sharks — experiencing finning, bycatch injury, or catch-and-release stress — also deserves moral consideration. A shark finned and thrown back into the water experiences hours of distress before death. A shark caught on longline and held alive for extended periods suffers acute stress. These are not background facts but genuine welfare harms occurring at enormous scale. Addressing shark welfare requires both reducing overall fishing pressure and implementing welfare-improving practices in fisheries that cannot avoid shark bycatch.