There may be no live carp in the offers of Polish stores as of next year because MPs from the main opposition party Civic Platform (PO) want to table a bill banning the sales, according to a Polish newspaper.

In Poland, carp is the main course of the elaborate 12-course feast on Christmas Eve. To have the fish as fresh as possible, many Poles for years have headed to stores to buy a live carp for the holiday season and kept it alive in the bathtub for a couple of days before killing it at home.

But, according to the Rzeczpospolita daily, the upcoming holidays may be the last when live fish can be bought.

Katarzyna Piekarska, a PO MP and a member of the Friends of Animals Parliamentary Group, has said she and her colleagues from PO will submit draft legislation to the lower house providing that the sale of live fish will only be possible in the case of breeding fish and aquarium specimens, the newspaper wrote.

“The world is changing, and… if we look at public opinion polls, the time has come to ban the sale of live carp,” she said, as cited by Rzeczpospolita.

For the average fish consumer, in practice this means a ban on the sale of live carp, which will now have to be killed at the point of purchase by a trained person, the daily wrote.