Pre-slaughter handling in salmon aquaculture has significant welfare implications, with crowding stress, effective stunning, and rapid killing all affecting the quality of death experienced by millions of fish.
Salmon pre-slaughter welfare encompasses the final hours from crowding through stunning to death - a period during which each fish experiences stress, potential pain from handling, and ideally rapid insensibility. The welfare science clearly identifies effective electrical stunning as superior to CO2 methods and as achievable at commercial scale. The alignment of welfare and quality in salmon - pre-slaughter stress impairs fillet quality through cortisol-driven changes - creates commercial incentives for welfare improvement that reinforce regulatory requirements. Consumer demand for welfare-certified salmon is growing and represents the market signal that drives adoption of superior welfare methods.