Sea turtles strand on beaches across the world in tens of thousands annually, providing rescue opportunities but also raising welfare questions about rehabilitation and release.
Sea turtle rehabilitation raises genuine welfare questions: some rehabilitation programmes achieve high release success rates, genuinely returning healthy animals to the wild. Others maintain turtles in tanks for years with limited release prospects, providing veterinary care but denying wild behaviour. The welfare of individual turtles in rehabilitation must be weighed against both the conservation benefit of returning reproductively important animals to the wild and the welfare harm of prolonged captivity. Welfare-led triage — rapid assessment of rehabilitation viability and humane euthanasia for non-viable cases — minimises total suffering.