Evidence that fish experience pain has grown substantially, driving development of analgesia protocols for veterinary procedures and aquaculture practices.
Fish pain management is an evolving area where scientific understanding has outpaced routine practice. The evidence for fish nociception and pain experience is now sufficient that many welfare scientists argue strongly for precautionary analgesia during invasive procedures. Research contexts have moved faster than commercial aquaculture in adopting pain management, but the ethical argument applies equally: if fish can suffer, routine procedures performed without analgesia in aquaculture cause unnecessary pain at enormous scale. The welfare cost of conservative inaction is potentially enormous.