Wild Atlantic and Pacific salmon face a gauntlet of welfare challenges during their extraordinary migrations. Understanding the threats they face helps identify the most effective conservation and welfare interventions.
Wild salmon welfare is inseparable from wild salmon conservation: the threats that are driving population collapse are simultaneously causing significant suffering in individual fish. The migration journey of an adult salmon — thousands of kilometers through increasingly warm, acidified, and obstructed ocean and river systems — is a welfare challenge of escalating intensity. Fish ladder passage around hydroelectric dams is exhausting, time-consuming, and not universally successful: many fish fail to negotiate ladders, are injured against turbine infrastructure, or expire from the additional energetic cost before reaching spawning grounds. Temperature stress during migration is intensifying as climate change warms river systems: salmon in rivers where temperature regularly exceeds 20 degrees are experiencing physiological stress that compromises immune function, accelerates spawning deterioration, and in acute heat events causes direct mortality. The welfare case for salmon habitat restoration, dam removal, river temperature management, and sea lice control around aquaculture sites is clear and aligns directly with the conservation case.