While wild salmon face fewer chronic welfare issues than farmed fish, the capture and landing process involves significant acute suffering that is increasingly under scrutiny.
Wild salmon caught in commercial fisheries typically experience a prolonged death. Net-caught fish may struggle for minutes to hours before dying of asphyxiation or traumatic injury. Unlike farmed fish, they cannot be efficiently stunned at scale on a vessel, though fishing boats with electrical stunning equipment are being trialled. From a welfare perspective, the most significant harm is the acute suffering at capture and death — a fundamentally different problem from the chronic welfare deficits of aquaculture, but one that still deserves attention.