Britain regulates how farmed mammals are killed. There are detailed rules covering restraint, stunning, bleeding, equipment and slaughterhouse practices. But when the victim is a fish, much of that detail disappears.
This is not because we do not know whether fishes suffer. The UK already recognises vertebrate animals as sentient. Fishes are vertebrates.
Research continues to expose just how badly humans have underestimated them. Cleaner fishes, for example, have shown behaviour researchers interpret as mirror self-recognition, investigating their reflections and attempting to remove marks they could see on their own bodies. These are not swimming ingredients. They are sentient individuals. And we breed them, confine them and kill them because people like eating them.
England’s own Animal Welfare Strategy acknowledges the extraordinary gap in protection at the end of that process.
Farmed fishes are covered by a general requirement to avoid “avoidable pain, distress or suffering” when killed. But unlike terrestrial farmed animals, the Government admits they have “no further detailed protections in domestic law”, including no specific requirement that they are stunned before being killed. So Britain recognises that fishes are sentient, permits an industry built around breeding and killing them, and then gives them fewer specific protections when that killing takes place.
Recent allegations from Scotland show what this can mean in practice.
Animal Equality UK released covert footage from a vessel operated by trout producer Kames. The organisation alleged that fishes were crowded, some were inadequately stunned, others faced delays before stunning and bleeding, and at least one fish was neither stunned nor bled before dying.
Kames supplies Waitrose and operates under the RSPCA Assured scheme. That alone should tell us something important. Labels, standards and assurances do not change what this industry is. The fish is still bred for someone else’s use. The fish is still confined. The fish is still eventually killed.
The RSPCA says methods including suffocation in air, carbon dioxide, killing on ice and bleeding without prior stunning cause serious suffering, while also acknowledging that fishes lack the detailed slaughter legislation applied to other farmed vertebrates. Those methods should absolutely be prohibited. But replacing one method of killing with another does not solve the fundamental problem. There is no right way to do the wrong thing. A properly stunned fish is still a fish who did not need to die. And slaughter is only the end of the story.
Inspection documents released after an Information Commissioner ruling exposed repeated mass deaths on Scottish salmon farms. More than 100,000 salmon suffocated at one site after their oxygen supply stopped. More than one million died from hydrogen sulphide there the same month. At an RSPCA-certified Bakkafrost site, 600,000 fishes died from hydrogen sulphide, followed months later by more than 1.5 million more. Animal Equality has also reported that Scottish salmon farms recorded almost 36 million unexpected fish deaths between 2023 and 2025.
Aquaculture also hides victims outside the farm itself. Carnivorous farmed fishes such as salmon and trout are commonly fed fishmeal and fish oil made from wild-caught fishes. Research suggests conventional estimates may massively underestimate how many animals are killed in the process. For salmon, producing one pound of farmed fish may require between 1.86 and 6.24 pounds of wild fish. So farming fishes does not simply replace fishing. Wild fishes are caught and killed to feed captive fishes, who are then killed themselves. Calling that a solution to fishing is absurd.
England has now promised detailed legal requirements for killing farmed fishes, subject to consultation. But when Green MP Adrian Ramsay asked when that consultation would begin and when legislation would take effect, the Government gave no timetable. Its response, published on 10 September 2026, said further details would come “in due course”.
Those protections are overdue. No sentient animal should be left conscious while their body is cut open. No fish should slowly suffocate because the law could not be bothered to specify otherwise. But better rules for killing cannot become the ambition. A stunning requirement does not make fish farming acceptable. A certification logo does not make confinement acceptable. A regulated slaughter method does not create a moral right to kill someone who did not need to die. The legal double standard exposes how little consideration fishes have historically received. Fixing that double standard is necessary. Ending their exploitation is the goal. Fishes do not exist for us. They are not crops growing underwater. They are animals with experiences, interests and lives of their own.
If recognising their sentience means anything, the answer cannot simply be finding a better way to kill them. It has to be stopping the killing.