Wild Atlantic salmon populations have collapsed across most of their historic range. The welfare of declining populations involves not just individual suffering but the existential threat of population extinction.
Wild Atlantic salmon welfare involves the slow-motion welfare crisis of population collapse and the acute welfare events experienced by individual fish during migration, capture, and spawning. The salmon run itself involves physiological extremes: animals that fast for months while swimming hundreds of kilometers, fighting currents, and ascending ladders, suffering immune suppression and progressive physical deterioration as they approach spawning. Adding sea lice infestation, temperature stress, and capture injuries to this already demanding lifecycle creates welfare burdens that contribute to population decline. Conservation of wild salmon populations is simultaneously a welfare intervention because it preserves the ecological conditions where salmon can complete their lives without additional anthropogenic stress.