How Do You Quickly And Humanely Kill Fish?

[Alpha Male]

I drain the livewell at the landing. they have 20-30 minutes before they get cleaned. have I ever cleaned a live fish? yes. do I feel bad? no.

 

Im not about to start cutting the heads, slitting their gills, or anything else. if I was worried about it I would go to the grocery store and buy fish.

[Subaqua Adinterim]

I have only kept one fish to eat over the last several years.  It was an atlantic salmon that I caught in Cayuga Lake a few years ago.  I remembered seeing someone catch a decent size trout in the Delaware river and he just grabbed the fish under the nose/top of the mouth and just pulled straight up and back.  It must have snapped the spine because the fish died instantly.  I remembered this and tried it on the atlantic salmon and it died instantly,  Not sure how this would work on fish with bigger heads than trout; however, I can attest that it did work when I tried it on a trout/salmon type fish.

[Kevin22]

I agree on the cutting the gills and blood part with bass. My brother tried the gill thing to bleed them, made a mess and the meat tasted the same.

 

 

 

I tried the ice today and that didn't work so well. One was still alive and the others were sorta hardened in a u-shape which made filleting hard.

 

 

 

I then tried using my knife to pierce the skull and reach the brain but it was so hard to push in I thought my knife blade was going to break in half and impale me. Man, I thought it was going to be easy to push the knife in after reading the posts on it.

 

 

 

Well, cutting the gills, icing, and piercing their skulls with my knife is out. What will I do now. lol.

 

 

 

 

And filleting them alive is also out of the question. lol. I did it in the past on a fish that I thought was dead. After one whole fillet was off it flopped around and threw scales everywhere inside my kitchen.

 

 

I know you already found your weapon of choice, but just to clarify I do not use a fillet knife to puncture the head. I use an old 5" fixed blade hunting/survival knife.