Atlantic cod farming has faced significant welfare challenges including high mortality, stereotypic swimming, and disease susceptibility. Understanding these challenges informs whether cod farming can achieve acceptable welfare standards.
Farmed cod welfare illustrates how species-specific characteristics interact with production systems to create welfare problems that cannot be easily resolved within conventional approaches. Cod's tendency toward stereotypic swimming in net pens, their cannibalism requiring constant size grading, and their high disease susceptibility in coastal systems created a welfare profile that contributed to the commercial failure of Norwegian cod farming. This is a case where the welfare and commercial problems reinforced each other. Land-based recirculating systems offer the possibility of better environmental control that could address the behavioral and disease welfare problems, but at higher production cost. Whether cod can be farmed at acceptable welfare standards remains genuinely uncertain and deserves careful ongoing evaluation rather than assumption.