Pre-slaughter handling and stunning methods for farmed Atlantic salmon significantly affect the duration of consciousness and pain experienced during the killing process.
The slaughter of billions of farmed salmon annually using ice slurry — leaving fish to die over minutes of consciousness — represents one of the largest sources of acute, preventable animal suffering in the food system. The evidence that salmon are sentient and experience nociception is now sufficiently established that welfare scientists describe ice slurry slaughter as causing minutes of pain before death. The good news is that effective electrical or percussive stunning systems are commercially available and increasingly mandated by progressive regulators. The welfare cost of slaughter practice is both large in scale and highly addressable through available technology.