Wild salmon depend on pristine river systems and ocean conditions. Protecting their habitat is both a conservation and an animal welfare imperative given the scale of salmon mortality from habitat degradation.
Wild salmon welfare is fundamentally an environmental welfare question — the suffering of wild salmon in degraded river systems is distributed across millions of individuals who face blocked migration, thermal stress, disease, and population collapse. From a welfare perspective, large numbers of fish suffering in chronically degraded conditions represents a welfare harm of significant scale. Dam removal projects have demonstrated that restoring wild salmon habitat produces dramatic welfare benefits: salmon populations recovering rapidly after barrier removal experience conditions they evolved for rather than the chronic stressors of blocked migration and thermal stress. Protecting wild salmon habitat is therefore simultaneously conservation, welfare, and ecological policy.