Freshwater fish face welfare harms from habitat degradation, pollution, and overfishing. As scientific understanding of fish sentience grows, welfare frameworks are expanding to include wild fish populations.
Wild freshwater fish experience welfare harms from human activities at enormous scale. Pharmaceutical pollution including antidepressants, hormones, and antibiotics alters fish behavior and physiology in ways that likely represent welfare harms. Hypoxia from agricultural eutrophication causes mass fish kills - acute mass suffering events. Dam construction eliminates migration opportunities for species that require movement between habitats. Recognizing wild fish welfare requires applying the same sentience evidence that applies to farmed fish to the vast populations of wild fish whose habitats are degraded by human activity.