Marine mammal rehabilitation programs rescue and treat entangled, injured, and malnourished seals and sea lions, with outcomes that demonstrate both welfare value and conservation contribution.
Marine mammal rehabilitation provides direct welfare benefits to individual animals that would otherwise die from injury, entanglement, or disease. The welfare cost of rehabilitation — transport stress, captive housing, medical procedures — must be weighed against the alternative of death or prolonged suffering without intervention. Well-designed rehabilitation minimizes human contact to preserve wild behavior. Outcomes are generally positive: release success rates are good for treatable conditions, and rehabilitated animals have been tracked as successfully integrating into wild populations. The educational impact — demonstrating the scale of human-caused marine mammal harm — is a significant additional benefit.