Atlantic cod farming is expanding, raising important welfare questions about stunning adequacy and slaughter standards for a species with significant pain capacity.
Farmed cod welfare at slaughter is an area where practices have not kept pace with scientific understanding. The evidence that cod experience pain and stress is now robust, yet live chilling — effectively slow freezing to death while conscious — remains in use by some producers. The regulatory gap between what science demonstrates about fish sentience and what slaughter standards require is particularly wide for emerging farmed species like cod, where welfare standards development has lagged production growth.