Extreme weather events driven by climate change impose acute welfare costs on wild animal populations through hypothermia, hyperthermia, starvation, and habitat flooding that kill individuals and reduce the quality of life of survivors.
Wild animal welfare during extreme weather events is rarely framed in welfare terms but represents acute mass suffering of individual animals at extraordinary scale. Intertidal animals cooked alive in a heat dome, mammals freezing in an unseasonal cold snap, and chicks drowning in flash-flooded nests are all welfare events affecting individual animals with whatever capacity for pain and distress their neurology allows. The climate connection means that addressing wild animal extreme weather welfare requires both immediate responses — feeding during severe winters, habitat management that reduces flood impacts — and long-term action on the climate change driving increasing event frequency. Wild animal welfare is a climate justice issue.