The vaquita porpoise is on the verge of extinction with fewer than 10 individuals remaining, making individual welfare considerations inseparable from the last-ditch conservation effort.
The vaquita's welfare situation is uniquely tragic because so few individuals remain that each individual's welfare directly determines the survival of the species. Entanglement in gillnets causes drowning — the same mechanism killing millions of other cetaceans as bycatch globally, but for the vaquita, each death is irreplaceable. The failed 2017 captive rescue attempt — in which a rescued female died from stress — demonstrated the difficulty of the welfare-conservation tension when so few individuals remain. The welfare case is now entirely dependent on immediate elimination of gillnet fishing in the vaquita's range — a law enforcement rather than animal husbandry challenge.