Great cormorants face persecution related to their predation on fish, raising welfare and legal questions about lethal control of a protected species.
Cormorant welfare sits at the intersection of wildlife law, fisheries management, and animal welfare ethics. As a protected species, cormorants cannot be killed without specific licence, yet licences for lethal control are issued regularly to protect fisheries. The welfare consequences of licenced shooting include acute death for successfully shot birds but also significant welfare harm from non-lethal injuries - birds hit but not killed may suffer from wounds, lead poisoning, and impaired diving ability before eventual death. The disturbance caused by shooting at roosting or fishing birds causes significant stress responses in the entire group. Non-lethal deterrents including laser devices, scarecrows, and netting provide welfare-neutral population management alternatives in some situations but may simply displace birds rather than protecting fish overall. The ethics of killing a wild protected species to benefit angling, a recreational activity, is debated within wildlife management, particularly given that cormorant predation at a landscape scale is ecologically normal even if locally problematic.