The conditions under which animals are kept and traded are directly linked to pandemic risk, making animal welfare a global public health priority.
Animal welfare and pandemic prevention are deeply connected. The conditions that cause suffering in animals — crowding, stress, compromised immunity — are also the conditions that favour infectious disease emergence and amplification. Factory farms are disease factories not incidentally but structurally. Wildlife markets combine the stress of capture, transport, and confinement with the mixing of species that would never encounter each other naturally. Improving animal welfare in these systems is simultaneously a moral obligation and a pandemic risk reduction measure.