Recreational fishing affects hundreds of millions of fish annually. Growing evidence on fish pain and stress is informing best practices that minimize welfare harm for catch-and-release anglers.
Recreational fishing creates welfare harms that have been largely ignored due to historical underestimation of fish sentience. Fish subjected to hook capture experience acute pain from the hooking wound, physiological stress from the fight, and handling stress during release. The cumulative welfare impact across billions of catch-and-release events annually is significant even under uncertain sentience assumptions. Best practice catch-and-release minimizes air exposure, uses barbless hooks, avoids squeezing fish, and releases fish that show full equilibrium rather than exhausted fish that may not recover. For anglers who retain fish, rapid stunning and killing is the welfare-positive alternative to slow air asphyxiation.