Pre-slaughter handling of farmed salmon involves crowding, pumping, and transport that cause significant stress, with management practices that can reduce welfare harm before slaughter.
Pre-slaughter handling welfare for farmed salmon represents a critical window where management choices make significant welfare differences. The decisions made during harvest - how quickly fish are crowded, how they are pumped between vessels, how long they are held before slaughter - cumulatively determine the welfare experience of hundreds of thousands of individual fish in each harvest event. Norwegian research and regulation provides some of the best frameworks for minimizing pre-slaughter stress, and Norwegian practices are increasingly being adopted as global standards.