Pre-slaughter handling and stunning of farmed salmon is a critical welfare moment affecting millions of fish. Current practices vary enormously in the suffering they cause.
Pre-slaughter handling of salmon is a welfare crisis at extraordinary scale. Live chilling — submerging conscious fish in ice slurry — causes several minutes of cold-water avoidance behavior and progressive loss of consciousness, during which the fish experiences both cold stress and asphyxia. This is the equivalent of the most inhumane slaughter methods banned for terrestrial animals. Effective humane alternatives exist: percussive stunning causes immediate unconsciousness; electrical stunning at correct parameters is rapid and effective. The barrier is cost and infrastructure, not technology. Consumer and regulatory pressure is needed to accelerate the transition to mandatory pre-slaughter stunning across the salmon farming industry globally.