Welfare assurance for humane fish slaughter.
StunAssure is a low-cost, explainable platform that helps farms and processors detect, document, and reduce welfare risks during stunning and slaughter — starting with post-stun verification. We do not claim to detect consciousness; we surface observable risk and route uncertain cases to human review.
We are a small interdisciplinary team. We are not claiming to have solved the whole problem — we are mapping the state of the art, identifying practical gaps, and building a modular verification system that adapts across economic contexts.
A large-scale welfare problem where small improvements reach enormous numbers of animals.
Even where stunning equipment exists, operators often lack affordable tools to confirm that fish are insensible — and stay insensible — before they are killed.
Only an estimated ~0.5%, mainly salmon, are currently reliably stunned before slaughter.
The overwhelming majority of farmed fish are killed without verified pre-slaughter insensibility.
Peer-reviewed estimate for 2019 (range 78–171 billion; Mood et al. 2023), corroborated by independent Fishcount data (~130 billion).
We didn't just design it — we built it.
A working prototype of the verification engine, running in your browser on simulated data.
Run a batch through the verification stack
Pick a species, introduce process trouble, and watch each fish pass through dose → recovery-clock → Echo-Stun, ending in a signed batch certificate. It runs the real engine, fails safe, and never claims to detect consciousness.
The missing layer is assurance.
The practical gap is not simply the absence of humane stunning methods — it is the lack of affordable, field-ready assurance that stunning is being applied correctly and remains effective under real operating conditions.
Electrical stunning depends on current, voltage, frequency, duration, water conductivity, fish size, species, density, and the time between stunning and killing. In many settings these variables are not continuously logged, checked, or translated into simple operator guidance. StunAssure focuses on this assurance layer: helping operators detect risk, document conditions, improve protocols, and avoid false confidence.
A practical system, grounded in evidence, built step by step.
What we don't claim matters as much as what we do.
StunAssure does not determine fish consciousness or guarantee humane slaughter. It is a decision-support and risk-management tool: it flags observable risk indicators and process deviations, explains every alert, and keeps expert humans central to every decision.