Wild salmon populations have declined dramatically due to habitat destruction, overfishing, and climate change — each of these also causes significant welfare harm to individual fish.
Wild salmon occupy a unique position in welfare discussions — their ecological importance is extraordinary, they support entire food webs and fertilize forests through their spawning migrations, and their individual welfare is genuinely at stake in the human decisions that affect their populations and habitats. Dams that block spawning migrations cause individual fish to exhaust themselves against impassable barriers — a genuine welfare harm that compounds the population-level conservation concern. Catch-and-release fishing, often promoted as conservation-friendly, still causes measurable stress and physical damage that can affect individual fish for days. Improving wild salmon welfare means improving their habitats, removing barriers, cleaning waterways, and managing fishing pressure responsibly.