Sharks face severe welfare threats from finning, bycatch and targeted fishing, with their capacity for pain and suffering increasingly recognised by science.
Finning causes a prolonged and agonising death - sharks thrown back without fins sink to the bottom where they suffocate or are eaten alive, unable to swim. The practice is so clearly cruel that it has prompted bans in many jurisdictions, yet continues in international waters and regions without enforcement. Even sharks caught as bycatch and returned alive suffer injury and physiological stress from handling. The welfare of individual sharks in fishing encounters is substantial. Society is only beginning to recognise that sharks, as apex predators with complex nervous systems, have capacities for suffering that warrant the same concern we give to other vertebrates.