Animal Equality releases disturbing footage of animals beaten, stepped on, and left to suffocate at trout farm in the Cotswolds
Harrowing animal abuse
The footage, captured by Animal Equality during multiple visits in March, April, and July 2025, reveals a harrowing series of welfare abuses at one of England’s oldest working trout farms. Visitors, including families and young children, are encouraged to catch and kill live trout with minimal supervision or training.
Our footage reveals:
- Fish repeatedly struck: Numerous instances where trout were hit as many as 10 times before losing movement and consciousness, often with workers present.
- Prolonged suffocation: Live fish were frequently left out of water for extended periods – one for up to 20 minutes – before being slaughtered. The RSPCA recommends that farmed trout are not kept out of water for more than 15 seconds, on animal welfare grounds.
- Improper stunning: In multiple cases, trout were not adequately stunned and were seen moving or gasping long after the initial blow.
- Live fish at gutting stations: Visitors reported witnessing still-living trout being taken to the farm’s gutting station.
- Child participation: Despite the farm’s own rules prohibiting children from killing fish, footage shows at least one child doing so.
We have submitted a formal complaint to Gloucestershire Trading Standards.
This is animal abuse, plain and simple. If dogs or cats were treated this way, there would be national outrage and swift legal action. But because these are fish, the violence is ignored. We must ask ourselves: what are we teaching our children by allowing them to watch and take part in this suffering? What future are we creating where animals suffer so extremely, simply to land on our plates?
Abigail Penny, Executive Director of Animal Equality UK
Children committing the killing
Our footage showed on one occasion a child was carrying out the slaughter, despite signs across the farm stating that this is not permitted.
In another clip, a mother is seen striking a trout in front of her distressed daughter. After realising the fish is still alive minutes later, she apologises and imitates the dead fish ‘talking’ to her daughter. In another scene, a young child is seen holding a teddy bear while a fish is beaten beside her.
The farm, marketed as a family-friendly tourist destination, supplies trout to local restaurants, hotels, and farmers markets across the Cotswolds. Signage across the farm boasts that trout are ‘carefully handled, nurtured and cared for’ and that all fish caught ‘must be killed by an adult’. Claims contradicted by the evidence obtained by Animal Equality.
A legal and ethical vacuum
Without binding protections, tens of millions of trout, salmon, and other farmed fish will continue to suffer extremely and in silence in their final moments of life. They are denied even the most basic of legal protections, the most basic compassion.
Abigail Penny, Executive Director of Animal Equality UK
This is not the first time that Animal Equality has exposed the mistreatment of farmed fish at slaughter, on large-scale intensive fish farms. In 2021, an investigation found salmon having their gills cut while conscious, in a 2023 investigation farmed fish entered stun-kill machinery backwards and smaller fish showed signs of consciousness after exiting the machine, while a 2024 investigation and further 2025 exposé revealed fish suffocating on multiple Scottish salmon farms.
Last month, the Scottish Government released salmon slaughter guidance, prompting nine animal protection organisations to pen a letter to Government Ministers warning that this ‘falls short of the legal protections urgently needed’. And in March this year, Animal Equality UK and The Humane League UK, released an expert-led report on trout welfare at slaughter, authored by Professor Lynne Sneddon of the University of Gothenburg, Chiawen Chiang of New York University, and Dr Cynthia Schuck-Paim, Scientific Director of the Welfare Footprint Project. The leading academics argue that “all steps throughout the process of slaughter, including the pre-slaughter stages, compromises the welfare of trout at the time of killing”. Such welfare issues include hunger and aggression – an outcome of prolonged fasting before slaughter, crowding, poor water quality, rough transport conditions, and a failure to properly stun before killing. The experts also point to human and mechanical failures that can exacerbate these problems, including lack of adequate training, worker fatigue, rough handling of animals, poor equipment set-up and subjecting fish to live killing due to a failure to detect non-stunned animals.
Millions at risk of agonising deaths
The British Trout Association reports that there are almost 290 trout farms in the UK, with 17,000 tonnes of trout farmed and killed annually in Britain, equating to approximately 20 million trout slaughtered for human consumption each year. Approximately half of those trout are slaughtered in Scotland (54%), with the remainder killed in England and Wales (46%). In February 2025, Waitrose publicly committed to introducing electrical stunning for farmed prawns – a decision widely celebrated by consumers and animal advocates – but no such requirements have been put in place by retailers for farmed trout.
Take action for animals!
Farmed fish are thinking, feeling animals, yet all too often they suffer in silence. While they cannot scream like humans, their pain is just as real as ours. If you are rightly disturbed by what we have uncovered at Bibury Trout Farm, you must ask yourself: if you wouldn’t kill an animal yourself, why pay someone else to do it for you? With so many delicious plant-based alternatives available in supermarkets nowadays, there’s no reason to slaughter and eat an animal. Try plant-based today!
And, we cannot forget the millions who are still trapped in this cruel system. Join Animal Equality by calling on the devolved UK governments to introduce legally enforceable, species-specific slaughter legislation for farmed fish, a proposal backed by government-advisory body the Animal Welfare Committee.
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