Disease outbreaks in livestock result in mass culling events that cause immense animal suffering. Improving disease prevention and management reduces both welfare harm and agricultural losses.
Livestock disease outbreaks create welfare crises of enormous scale. Culling hundreds of thousands or millions of animals during outbreaks causes suffering through the stress of muster and handling, transport, and killing methods that are often inadequate for speed and scale. Ventilation shutdown — sealing poultry barns to cause heat death — is a welfare catastrophe used because it is operationally convenient. Better approaches including humane killing methods, vaccination programmes to prevent outbreaks, and improved biosecurity to reduce introduction risk all reduce the scale and welfare harm of disease management events. Regulatory requirements for humane culling methods during outbreaks need strengthening and enforcement.