Monarch butterflies cluster in overwintering colonies requiring precise microclimatic conditions — disruption from tourism, logging, and climate events causes mass mortality with welfare implications.
Whether individual butterflies experience suffering is uncertain, but the scale of monarch overwintering mortality from human-caused disturbance is staggering. Millions of individuals dying from temperature exposure after logging removes the forest canopy that maintains colony microclimates represent a welfare harm whose magnitude justifies precautionary action. The interconnection between individual butterfly physiology, colony-level thermoregulation, and landscape-scale logging decisions illustrates how welfare outcomes at individual scale depend on policy decisions at landscape scale.