The pre-harvest phase is one of the most welfare-critical periods for farmed salmon, involving crowding, transport, and handling that cause significant acute stress.
The welfare of farmed salmon in the hours before slaughter is a concentrated version of the broader challenges of aquaculture welfare management. Multiple stressful events — crowding, transfer, transport, waiting — occur in rapid succession, each compounding the stress of the previous one. The cumulative welfare cost can be enormous even if each individual event appears manageable in isolation. A welfare-centered approach to pre-harvest management minimizes the number of handling events, optimizes conditions during each necessary procedure, provides resting time between stressful events where possible, and uses effective stunning that renders fish unconscious rapidly before any painful killing procedure. The alignment between welfare quality and meat quality in pre-harvest management provides a commercial incentive for improvement.