The period leading up to salmon harvest involves crowding, starving, and transfer stresses that represent significant welfare events requiring best-practice management.
Pre-harvest welfare in salmon aquaculture is both an ethical priority and a quality assurance issue — the alignment between welfare and product quality creates commercial incentives for welfare improvement. Fish experiencing severe crowding and hypoxia stress before harvest show elevated cortisol and lactic acid that degrades flesh quality. Calm, well-managed pre-harvest operations that maintain water quality, minimize unnecessary crowding, and move fish efficiently to slaughter produce both better welfare outcomes and better product. The welfare case for percussion stunning — and for ensuring it is correctly applied before killing — is unambiguous: fish experiencing effective percussive stunning are unconscious before the killing blow, preventing the awareness of any subsequent pain.