Pre-slaughter handling and stunning of farmed salmon is one of the most welfare-significant events in their lives. Evidence-based stunning methods can dramatically reduce suffering at slaughter compared to conventional practices.
Pre-slaughter welfare for farmed salmon represents a welfare improvement opportunity with very large aggregate impact. Atlantic salmon are slaughtered in enormous numbers — billions of individual fish annually across global aquaculture — and the manner of their death has substantial welfare significance if they experience pain and distress. EEG studies have definitively shown that fish killed by conventional methods including asphyxiation or chilling in ice slurry maintain brain activity consistent with consciousness for many minutes, experiencing the hypoxia, cold shock, or both that characterize these death processes. Electrical stunning, when correctly calibrated to species and fish size, produces immediate loss of consciousness confirmed by EEG measurement. The technology is available and has been implemented as a regulatory requirement in Norway, demonstrating that industry-scale adoption is feasible. The primary barriers to wider adoption are regulatory absence in most producing countries and cost concerns that have not prevented adoption in the Norwegian industry, which competes in the same global market.