Pre-slaughter welfare for farmed Atlantic salmon involves crowding, handling, and killing procedures that cause measurable stress, and improvements are being driven by science and regulation.
Salmon pre-slaughter welfare has been transformed by regulation and certification schemes in the most advanced producing countries. The science is clear: percussive stunning or electrical stunning followed by gill cutting produces rapid, humane loss of consciousness, while live chilling involves prolonged consciousness before death. The welfare gap between best and worst practice is enormous - and the scale of production, hundreds of millions of salmon annually in Norway alone, means improvements have enormous cumulative impact.