Over a trillion fish a year are yanked from the water and killed, often without the consideration of a humane death that we (sporadically) extend to farm animals like cows and pigs. For so long, we can only assume that fish were feeling some degree of pain, which is a part of the occupational hazard of being delicious. However, thanks, or probably no thanks, depending on how you see it, to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, fish may be experiencing unbelievable agony for several minutes during the farming process.Lead researcher Cynthia Schuck-Paim of the Welfare Footprint Institute focused on rainbow trout since it’s a widely farmed species. To quantify fish suffering, Cynthia and her team used something called the Welfare Footprint Framework to calculate precisely how much pain and suffering fish undergo as they are killed by asphyxiation after being scooped out from the sea. The extremely grim WFF measurement combines the duration and intensity of suffering into a clean and neat number that describes just how agonizing it was for a fish as it was choked to death by being out of water.What Fish Feel When They’re Taken From Water Is HorrifyingThe team found that the average fish suffers 24 minutes per kilogram of fish killed, and in worst-case scenarios, that climbs to over an hour of agony per kilo. Depending on the size of the fish, they could be experiencing an agonizing death that lasts anywhere between two and 25 minutes.Just five seconds out of water kicks off a neurochemical panic in the fish’s brain. Fish writhe and flop, trying to escape a surface world that they are not equipped to breathe in. Their gills collapse, CO₂ builds up, blood acidifies, and eventually, after several minutes of unimaginable agony in this living hell, they black out.If humanity cares about humanely killing its food, we should probably think about extending that courtesy to fish—and there are ways of going about it. There’s a method called electrical stunning that knocks a fish unconscious before it’s killed. The only problem is it’s inconsistent. Some fish fully knock out, others are woozy, while others still are completely unaffected.The WFF may not be a perfect way of quantifying fish suffering, but it does provide a semblance of quantifiable empathy that, hopefully, can one day lead to a change in standards that make a fundamentally necessary process a little less brutal. From going to farm fish by the billions, the least we can do is make sure we’re not casually torturing them for several minutes at a time.The post This Is What Fish Feel When They’re Taken From Water. It’s More Horrifying Than You Think. appeared first on VICE.