Extensive cattle ranching in South America and Australia involves welfare challenges from scale and remoteness.
Extensive cattle ranching in remote areas creates welfare challenges from the difficulty of monitoring and treating animals across vast landscapes. Individual cattle that develop disease, injury from fighting or predators, or calving complications may not be found for days or weeks. While extensive systems provide natural grazing conditions superior to feedlots, the lack of monitoring and veterinary access creates welfare gaps that intensive systems with daily observation do not have. Additionally, the deforestation driving Amazon expansion creates indirect wildlife welfare harms at enormous scale.