Stunning fish before slaughter reduces suffering during harvest. Understanding the different methods and their welfare profiles helps consumers, producers, and regulators make better choices.
Fish stunning is the single most impactful intervention available for improving farmed fish welfare at slaughter, affecting every individual fish at the end of their production cycle. The contrast between a fish rendered immediately insensible by percussive stunning and a fish slowly dying in an ice slurry over several minutes is a stark welfare difference that technology can close. Norway success in achieving near-universal salmon stunning through regulation demonstrates that industry adoption is achievable when required. The welfare dividend of universal adoption would benefit over a billion farmed fish annually, making this one of the highest-volume welfare improvements available in any sector of animal use.