Make it look like an accident, wipe for prints.
I’m surprised at the lack of fish puns in this thread. I’m sure it’s a fluke, but the punsters will be along soon hook me with puns and give me a haddock.
No.
This thread is about the best way to kill fish. If you want to argue fish have feelings and whatnot, I would suggest starting a new thread in GD.
Well, somebody asked why you’d bother.
Here’s the most effective way to kill a fish. I think Argent Towers already has one of the necessary tools.
Another option for killing fish is to ask a friend to care for your tank while you are on vacation.
I always thought throwing a plugged-in toaster into a pond was a good way to get a lot of free dead fish.
Even more hijack-ey, perhaps, but you most certainly would not have such a right. Dogs aren’t fish - they have large brains, distinct personalities, and are very clearly conscious. There are some cases in which you could kill your dog humanely - terminal illness, behavioral problems, and so on - but doing it for the lulz will land you behind bars. This is a good overview of DC, VA and MD animal-cruelty laws: http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/sections/environment_energy_and_natural_resources/animal_law/cruelty06.cfm
I don’t know for an absolute certainty, but the tiny brain size and limited behavioral repertoire of most fish strongly suggests they aren’t significantly more conscious than worms.
I either put them in an ice-chest, where their metabolism slows down till death - no suffering i woud think, or I put them on a stringer, where they stay alive (if you do it right) until I clean them. Putting them on a stringer also allows me to put them back in the lake if I dont catch enough to mess with cleaning - very seldom. When we perch fish we catch 50-100, I cant imagine (and never have seen) stopping and clubbing each fish to death between each catch. Never even heard of it.
I agree with this entire post but especially the above.
Clubbing a fish the size of a crappie (much less a bluegill) is ineffective. I have been on deep sea boat where I have seen deck-hands effectively club bigger fish but my attempts to apply this method to smaller fresh water fish were mostly failures - from a ‘preserving the meat’ angle but more importantly from an apparent ’ less suffering’ angle.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli.
A soft hearted friend of mine (female) says that you could try drowning them.
Which, technically, you do by taking them out of the water.
Now THAT, gets the prize for best/funniest post, in this thread! 
(I now have people looking at me as if I’ve suddenly went *“mental”, *and might possibly benefit from a moderate dose of tranquilizers!) 
Thanks! :rolleyes:
That’s what I do too- usually chunk them in the cooler with the ice, and they gradually cool down and either die, or if they’re still moving, are pretty much anesthetized when I behead them and clean them.
I have also just beheaded them and cleaned them straight out of the water, under the assumption that a sharp knife in the right place is about as quick as you could ask for.
I once went fishing with some neighbor-friends at like 3AM and we’re all hammered. It was a fun time, pretending to catch fish, but it was getting cold. 20 minutes of nothing, we’re all ready to go inside, and then all of a sudden, BAM, a big fish caught the line. Hoooly crap. Surprisingly, one guy managed to reel it in.
Being drunk idiots without much fishing experience, we then didn’t know what to do. Throw it back? No that felt like it would invalidate our proud catch. Kill it? We’re not barbarians! Somebody suggested the most humane thing to do would be to eat it. Which necessitates killing it… but it’s ok if we are EATING it. So, in we go to the kitchen! All this time it’s flopping around and just being pitiful. We pause in trepidation. After a while it stops moving…
Until THWACK goes the knife, which was apparently not nearly as sharp as it looked. In a burst of piscadrenaline, the fish went absolutely bananas, flopping around the kitchen, scattering plates and cutlery everywhere. Panic ensues. Girls scream. A fish scale goes flying off to a stray cupboard. While we’re all floundering around, The owner of the house suddenly lunges for the fish, grabs it, slams it on the counter, and hits it hard 4 more times with the struggling knife. Thwack! die fish Thwack! omg cmon THWACK!! ah we are so sorry THWACRACK!! ah I can’t do this anymore… That fish head ain’t going nowhere. It flops around a bit more until it hears the bell sound and goes to its corner to get ready for the next round.
But there would be no next round. It had won, if you could call it that. We took it back to the lake and tossed it in. The mood was somber, and we all went home. Perhaps in the end, it saved its own life. Perhaps it was ok… Sorry little fish =/
You’d be surprised how quickly the Inverse Square Law cuts in.
“Honey, there’s a bare wire in this water and I’m being electrocuted.”
“Never mind.”
This and This.
@ OP, why are you killing your fish before your clean them? The meat will stay fresher and less likely to spoil if you just keep them alive on the stringer as jeffsdad and nivlac have said.
And these are crappie right? You don’t need a mallet, just use your fillet knife to cut their heads off underneath the gills. Crappie are small fish. The mallet clubbing is reserved for much larger fish that may not be able to hold still when cleaning them.