Farm Animal Welfare Fund

Farm Animal Welfare Fund — RFP: Humane Fish Slaughter

Funds practical technologies that improve humane fish handling and slaughter outcomes.

Eligibility · Global — open worldwide

Coefficient Giving's Farm Animal Welfare Fund has issued a Request for Proposals for technologies and prototypes that materially improve the welfare of fish at the point of capture or slaughter. The impetus is scale: over 100 billion farmed fish are slaughtered each year, and fewer than 0.5 percent — primarily salmon — are reliably stunned before slaughter using percussive or electrical methods. For the more than one trillion wild-caught fish slaughtered annually, no equivalent even exists. The RFP funds solutions that render pre-death insensibility instantaneous, long-lasting (ideally permanent), verifiable, and scalable within the physical constraints of aquaculture and fisheries operations. Particular priority goes to solutions practical on fishing vessels with limited power and space, solutions for small wild fish caught in large quantities, and improvements on existing electrical stunning for farmed fish.

Coefficient Giving expects to spend approximately $7 million USD on this RFP over the next year, with the possibility of spending substantially more depending on application quality. Proposals of varying scope are welcome, from exploratory research to advanced prototype development at up to TRL 7–8. Eligible applicants include individuals, universities and research institutions, companies of any size, and public sector research organizations; successful teams are expected to be somewhat interdisciplinary, combining biology, electrical or mechanical engineering, aquaculture, and animal welfare science expertise. All geographies are eligible. The submission deadline is July 1, 2026.

The application process begins with a Letter of Intent of 2,500–3,000 words covering approach overview, research and project plans, organizational structure, timeline, and budget, submitted via a dedicated form at coefficientgiving.org. Coefficient Giving will pay a $4,000 honorarium to applicants whose LOI meets a minimum quality bar or ranks among the top 125 received. From that group, 5–30 candidates will be invited to submit full proposals by September 30, 2026. The program is managed under the Farm Animal Welfare Fund, which has historically invested hundreds of millions of dollars in welfare improvements across farmed and wild animals.