Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Could you bring some kind of shallow container and ad the fish in with some water and leave it a few yards from the lake/river? Predators would take care of it. Not sure it would be humane really, but it would be natural.

Dont know if this has been mentioned , but what about live feed for other fish ?

I know my Trout would well appreciate a cupla hundred 3cm fish being chucked in the tank with them .

How about rubbing alcohol?

small club in hand and knock fish out, then sharp knife through brain.

Need to be pretty small if the fish are only 3 cm long

being into aquariums ive had to do this for some pets in the past following this link posted before.



has the mix of clove oil to use to knock them out. would make up buckets/containers of river water/clove oil and river water/metho, put a batch of fish in the clove oil for a while then into the metho for a while.

you can use "metho" for the alcohol to kill them. metho is ethanol ("drinking" alcohol) with a little methanol added to stop people drinking it (caus its not taxed like drinking alcohol) tho people do still drink it

or i guess if you just wanted to use the metho you could justify saying they only get "drunk" and die from it... but to me getting alcohol in gills etc would probably feel something like getting alcohol in a cut or in your eye?

this may be too simplistic but why not a chum grinder? 3cm fish are going to take too much time to whack individually or dip in multiple oil / vodka baths etc etc... a grinder would finish a little guy in less than a second.



i would modify something like this to have a large funnel on top so you could easily dump large quantities of fish

that is how they kill the male baby chickens. They sex them at the hatchery then the males go directly into a grinder and are made into baby chicken paste. Kinda sad they get to live for a half hour or so and that is that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ--faib7to That video has me purchasing local raised chicken and hopefully some home raised eggs if I get the room some day.

Given the potential for poor welfare at the time of slaughter, it is likely that the slaughter method will be a part of any welfare assessment scheme. There were 5 methods of slaughter reported by farmers during the farm visits; percussive stun to the head destroying the brain, electric stunning, asphyxiation in air, asphyxiation in ice slurry and immersion in carbon dioxide saturated water. The most common method of slaughter recorded was electric stunning.
Asphyxiation, whether in air or ice, and the use of carbon dioxide were considered as unacceptable by the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC 1996) and this opinion is echoed by Compassion in World Farming (Stevenson 2007). Since the FAWC report of 1996, much research has been conducted into electric stunning (Robb et al. 2002, Robb and Kestin 2002, Lines et al. 2003, Lines & Kestin, 2004, 2005.) and this method, along with a percussive stun to the head, are seen as acceptable and humane methods of slaughtering fish. Due to the small size at which table portion fish are harvested (350-400g), a percussive stun to the head is not an economical method of killing fish (Robb et al. 2002) and therefore for large scale table producers the only viable method is by electric stun. For the slaughter method to be a part of a welfare assessment scheme, it is foreseeable that the only acceptable slaughter methods will be by percussive or electric stun.

After reading about the need to bleed the fish out to keep the flesh tasting good I now use the percussive blow to the head with the pope and then immediately cut up the belly using a sharp scissors, pull out the guts and snip off at the base of the head. This leaves the heart behind still pumping all the blood out . Not exactly what you had in mind hey! This for big fish obviously. For 3cm fish I have no idea...

Poisoning, heating, cooling starving of air may be visually easier but all sound a bit inhumane to me. A quick sharp knife through the throat dead instantly

+1, and i wouldnt reccomend grinding anything up alive, thats just disgusting IMO
the way i see it, kill the fish the way you would like to be killed if it was visa versa

Except for bad guys in gory movies....

Oh common it isn't practical to kill 3cm fish individually esp when she was talking about in bulk in the field... Where it isn't going to be practical to carry around chemicals or generate electricity etc etc and I'd argue the fish would die faster to a grinder than having it's throat slit and bleeding out >.<

its still inhumane and unnecessary.

for field surveys that require fish culls (some studies kill >50,000 fish, a massive waste) they use ice, or an ice slurry. even in a bag it will do the trick