 The slow growth and low reproductive rates of Pacific spiny dogfish make them vulnerable to overfishing, but unlike the spiny dogfish found in other regions, which has been declared overfished in the past, stock assessments for the Pacific spiny dogfish in Alaska, British Columbia, and the West Coast of the United States have either found that the data are not informative about the stock status, or that the stock is not overfished and that overfishing is not occurring.Dogfish have been harvested for subsistence use on the Pacific coast for centuries, but commercial fisheries first began targeting dogfish in the 1930s and commercial landings of Pacific spiny dogfish in the West Coast of the United States were highest in the 1940s, driven by a market for Vitamin A from shark liver oil.The mortality due to fishing was estimated to have peaked at over 15,000 mt in 1944 but rapidly declined in the years after that and remained below 3,000 mt for the years since 1950.