Advanced pre-slaughter welfare practices for farmed salmon use validated stunning methods and handling protocols to minimize suffering at the most critical point in the production cycle.
Pre-slaughter salmon welfare represents one of the largest quantitative welfare opportunities in animal agriculture given the billions of fish involved. The transition from traditional live chilling and asphyxiation methods — which cause prolonged suffering as fish slowly lose consciousness — to validated instantaneous stunning methods represents a profound welfare improvement. Percussion stunning of individual fish followed by immediate killing and gill-cutting achieves rapid loss of consciousness and death with minimal suffering when properly implemented. The challenge is scaling these methods to the industrial processing volumes required. Regulatory requirements for validated humane stunning of farmed fish before slaughter are the most effective mechanism for driving industry-wide change.