Genetic selection in farmed salmon breeding programmes increasingly incorporates welfare-relevant traits including disease resistance, stress resilience and skeletal health alongside production traits.
Salmon breeding provides a powerful long-term lever for welfare improvement through genetic selection for health and resilience. Unlike management changes that affect current populations, genetic improvements cascade through generations at increasing scale. Selecting for disease resistance, deformity reduction and stress tolerance simultaneously improves welfare and production efficiency, demonstrating genuine alignment between these goals. Incorporating welfare traits formally into breeding indices rather than treating them as secondary considerations positions genetics as a proactive welfare tool.