Wild salmon face welfare challenges across their life cycle from fishing practices, habitat degradation, and obstacles to migration.
Wild salmon welfare encompasses the stress of migration obstacles, the trauma of catch-and-release fishing, and the suffering caused by commercial harvest methods. Protecting wild salmon welfare requires improving fish passage at dams, reducing bycatch in commercial fisheries, and ensuring catch-and-release practices minimize harm. The collapse of wild salmon populations is both a conservation and welfare catastrophe.