How to put a fish to sleep (euthanize)

I never had to do that . What sickness can a fish get that it need to be put to sleep ?
Ever seen a fish suffering from dropsy? It's quite sad.

Friend of mine had a Gourami who contracted it. Her head swelled up like crazy and she would bash herself against the aquarium walls hard for a few minutes, then lay on her side motionless for a few hours. We felt awful and wanted to help but there was nothing we could do other than quicken her inevitable demise.
 
Crush the skull against a hard surface with a rock. ends things real quick. Fish do have an uncanny ability to survive injuries. Growing up in LA my family had a boat and we would always get live bait from the barge before heading out to fish for the day. I would hook the live mackerel or sardine right behind the head and under the spine. The fish woud stay alive and swim on the hook, great bait.
 
A trick I learned from my grandma a while back: Take a bucket of freshwater filled with ice and table salt. Mix it up.
The salt reduces the boiling point of the water, so it's basically colder as you're melting the ice.
Scoop out the fish you need to kill, dunk it in the bucket as deep as you can get it, net and all so it can't swim around.
10 minutes or so does the trick.
 
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To be honest, I appreciate the way the natural world works, as there is balance; however, the way a lioness hunts and slowly suffocates a baby gazelle it catches via piercing and crushing it's breathing pipe is immoral in terms of humanity. But then again, humanity, to me, is another way that people desperately try make themselves better than any other animal that we co-habitat with on this planet.

Compassion for life though, is a trait that many animals have, however many animals also don't have that compassion. Animals, in general, don't kill another unless it's for territory or to eat them. People however, kill for every reason imaginable, whether it be for bragging rights, sport, food, to eradicate a 'pest', etc.

I'm glad to see that people here are trying to be compassionate about the possible pain that a fish may or may not experience while being euthanized. I believe that if an animal can feel stress, it can too feel pain. I do not have any evidence to back this belief up, however, the way I see it, until it's proven that fish cannot feel pain, it would be more moral to assume that they do feel pain, as we do, since we do not know any better nor can we recognize the ways in which fish may or may not express pain.

But that's me just going off on a tangent.

Back to the original post...
If I have a small fish, that say is deformed in a way that will make it much harder to compete for food in what ever miniature ecosystem I have provided for them, which would therefore cause them to slowly waste away and starve to death (not to mention if those deformed fish also do happen to be lucky enough to survive and breed and create offspring that are also deformed in a manner that does not help them survive), I would simply feed them to one of my predatory fish. Nothing is wasted, the deformed fish served it's purpose as food, as it would in the wild.

If I have a larger fish that has gotten sick, and is clearly showing signs of it not being able to compete for food, nor is it trying to eat or survive, at that point, I would simply cover the fishes head, and decapitate it with a sharp knife. The rest of the fish does not go to waste, it gets filleted, and fed to my turtles. The death is simple and quick, although a bit gruesome for the more faint hearted, but at least that fish that was sick now can continue to serve a purpose, and will contribute to the hopefully long and healthy life of another animal.

This is the way I think of it. I do consider my fish as pets, but at the end of the day, the method used to euthanize a fish is irrelevant as long as the death is quick, and the remains of the fish are not wasted.
 
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