Repercusiones sobre el bienestar y la calidad de la carne del manejo previo sacrificio de la trucha arcoíris

Abstract

Aquaculture is an animal production system that has undergone continuous growth, exceeding fisheries production in recent years. Within aquaculture production, rainbow trout farming (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is the third most important worldwide and is highly developed. However, animal welfare and flesh quality, which are closely linked, have become more important to both aquaculture producers and consumers, so it is necessary to focus research on these issues. Pre-slaughter management includes a number of practices that generate a stress response in fish and if this response is high enough, it may affect fish welfare negatively and consequently flesh quality is going to be worse. Two of the most common practices in this phase are pre-slaughter fasting, ensuring a complete emptying of the digestive system while reducing potential flesh contamination problems during evisceration, and harvesting to remove fish from their raceways or cages for slaughter and subsequent processing. Neither fasting nor harvesting can be avoided but we can try to reduce the stress response that they generate by modifying their duration or using techniques that allow fish to better adapt to these stressors, such as changing feeding frequencies in the last month of fattening for a better adjustment to pre-slaughter fasting. So, in this thesis, we studied the impact of pre-slaughter fasting and harvesting both on animal welfare and flesh quality in rainbow trout, considering ways to minimize the stress response generated by pre-slaughter fasting using different feeding frequencies in the last month fattening ...