Programs monitoring wild animals for zoonotic disease spillover risk involve capture, sampling, and marking that cause welfare harm requiring assessment and mitigation.
Zoonotic surveillance welfare sits at the intersection of global public health urgency and individual animal welfare. Surveillance programs motivated by pandemic prevention are among the highest-stakes applications of wildlife research — the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the value of early spillover detection. But the welfare cost to individual animals captured, sampled, and marked is real. Non-invasive methods — environmental DNA, remote camera detection, fecal sampling — can replace invasive capture for many surveillance questions and deserve priority investment.