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Fish welfare is more than the absence of suffering! 🐟
▪️ For decades, animal welfare focused mainly on keeping animals healthy and protecting them from pain, fear and disease. These remain essential—but good welfare involves more than avoiding negative experiences. It also means giving animals opportunities to experience positive affective states and rewarding experiences.
✔️ Because emotions cannot be measured directly, researchers use behavioural indicators to investigate positive welfare in fishes. Exploration, stable social interactions, appropriate feeding, learning, play-like behaviours, and active engagement with the environment may all provide valuable clues about how fish are experiencing their lives.
▪️Preference and motivation tests reveal what fish choose—and what they are willing to work for. Fishes can have preferences for colours, substrates, plants and even particular social companions. Providing opportunities to explore, interact, choose, learn, and engage with their environment can therefore be an important part of promoting positive welfare.
> Main sources: Assessment of positive welfare: A review (Yeates & Main, 2008); Positive welfare for fishes: Rationale and areas for future study (Fife-Cook & Franks, 2019).
(posted on 2026/09/03)
➜About us
FishEthoGroup is a team of motivated professionals focused on improving fish welfare based on their behaviours.
We develop scientific and applied actions to reach our goals by promoting research, helping to disseminate knowledge, giving consultancy, and training about fish welfare.
Want to know more about us? See information below.
Who we are
Who we are
We are a non-profit association bridging the gaps between science and the stakeholders in the aquaculture sector: producers, certifiers, retailers, NGOs, policy makers and consumers. Our goal is to study and improve the welfare of farmed fishes and other aquatic animals by applying ethological scientific knowledge into best practices in fish farming.
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What we stand for
What we stand for
Throughout the years, our team has been involved in many areas of the aquaculture sector, from scientific research to campaigning, from auditing to policy. We use that expertise to promote the welfare of fishes through many initiatives with our partners and collaborators.
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What we do
What we do
We develop science-based solutions to assess and improve the welfare of captive and wild-caught fishes. In our approach, we apply a strong background in aquaculture and ethology to address the welfare of fishes. We use state-of-the-art knowledge on the behaviour of a species to understand how its welfare is affected under farming conditions and what we can do to promote it.
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Partners and collaborations
Need help?
If you are interested in scientific and technical expertise applied to welfare in fish farming, please contact us.
We develop custom-made welfare solutions for your initiatives, as consultancy in farms or other facilities, tailored courses, guidance, certification requirements or systems, specific research studies and welfare protocols (see What we do).
Questions? Suggestions? Drop us a line!
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