Hundreds of billions of farmed fish are slaughtered annually, often without effective stunning. Implementing humane slaughter methods is one of the highest-impact welfare improvements available.
The scale of farmed fish slaughter makes the absence of humane stunning perhaps the largest quantifiable welfare problem in current food systems. Each percentage improvement in stunning adoption across global aquaculture represents hundreds of millions of individual welfare impacts. The suffering of fish killed without stunning — experiencing consciousness during asphyxiation, CO2 exposure, or evisceration — is real and measurable through cortisol responses, neurological activity, and behavioural indicators. The technical solutions exist and are commercially deployed in progressive sectors. The welfare priority is scaling adoption from high-welfare exemplars to industry standard practice through regulatory requirements, certification conditions, and consumer demand for humanely slaughtered fish.