Pacific salmon populations have collapsed dramatically over recent decades due to habitat loss, dams, overfishing, and climate change, with profound welfare implications for individual fish and ecosystems.
Pacific salmon face an accelerating cascade of welfare threats across their complex life cycle. Juvenile salmon in degraded rivers face water temperatures that cause physiological stress and mortality before they reach the ocean. Returning adults navigating through heated rivers experience physiological exhaustion and pre-spawn mortality at rates that devastate populations. The welfare of individual fish is inseparable from the health of the ecosystems they depend on. Dam removal, riparian restoration, and climate mitigation are simultaneously conservation and welfare interventions for a keystone species whose abundance underwrites entire ecosystem food webs.