White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease devastating North American bat populations, raises welfare concerns for millions of individual bats and has potential implications for UK bat populations.
White-nose syndrome welfare involves the suffering of millions of individual bats waking repeatedly from hibernation in winter, depleting energy reserves and dying of starvation before spring. The disease disrupts the fundamental thermoregulatory strategy of hibernation, and affected bats show distress behaviours including grooming and movement during periods when they should be torpid. The scale of individual suffering across affected bat populations is enormous. The ecological consequences extend beyond welfare to food web disruption across large areas. Prevention through cave access management and research into treatment options addresses welfare at both individual and population scale.