There is considerable concern about numbers of Peale's Dolphins that are hunted with harpoons in the Strait of Magellan and around Tierra del Fuego, where the meat is used as bait in crab traps (Lescrauwaet and Gibbons 1994). Although direct hunting of dolphins has been prohibited in Chile since 1977, crab traps for centolla (southern king crab) Lithodes antarctica and centollon (false king crab) Paralomis granubosa, are still set with dolphin meat. Sielfeld et al. (1977) estimated some 2,350 dolphins, including both L. australis and Cephalorhynchus commersonii, were killed during the 1976/1977 crab-fishing season to bait crab traps used in the Strait of Magellan and the Chilean part of the Beagle Channel; this level of take across a number of years could have had a significant impact on the population. No recent estimates are available on the number of marine mammals killed for bait (Brownell et al. 1999; Lescrauwaet pers. comm.), but it is thought to be lower than in the past (Goodall 2002). Dolphin takes in the Argentinean sector stopped after the early 1980s (Goodall 2002).

Peale's dolphins are incidentally entangled and drowned in nets (Jefferson et al. 1993). There are reports from Queule and Mehuin (Chile), southern Patagonia, northeastern Tierra del Fuego and southern Santa Cruz (Argentina) that local fishermen may incidentally catch Peale's dolphins (Reyes 1991; Brownell et al. 1999). In the northern part of their Pacific range, however, Peale's dolphins seem to be rarely taken (Goodall 2002). Their close dependence on kelp forests may render them vulnerable to habitat loss (Viddi and Lescrauwaet 2005).