Fish tales with Ron and Don: How to humanely kill a fish

What’s a humane way to kill a fish? Apparently, it’s not that obvious to KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don.

The hosts each have their own method, and in the end, each works.

“My uncle said you hit ’em in the head with a ball-pein hammer,” Don said. “Now we have people writing us saying, ‘No, that’s not how you kill a fish.’ You’re supposed to stab them and bleed them out, and all this other stuff.”

Ron said that when he went fishing for catfish as a kid, they would nail the fish to a tree, then take pliers, and pull the skin off of the fish.

But the question Don wanted to answer was how to humanely kill a fish.

To land an answer, Don did what most fishermen do &#8212 they ask for the sage advice of other fishermen. In Don’s case, that means putting a call in to George Goddard &#8212 fellow fisherman with knowledge of the sea.

“It’s very simple,” Goddard said. “Get the fish on board, if it’s a medium size fish, you take a fish bonker &#8212 much like a policeman’s night stick, shorter in length &#8212 and you bonk it on the head, maybe two or three times. You don’t kill it, you just stun the fish.”

“Then you take a sharp knife and you cut the gills,” he said. “In other words: you bleed the fish.”

Goddard then advised that the fish should be put in an ice box.