Sea turtles face a combination of human-caused threats that cause enormous suffering across all life stages — from plastic ingestion and fishing entanglement as adults to nest disturbance and disorientation of hatchlings.
Sea turtles experience suffering across the full arc of their long lives — from hatchlings disoriented by artificial light to adults choking on plastic or drowning on longlines. The welfare case for sea turtle conservation is both a conservation and an animal welfare argument: these are animals with decades-long lifespans, capable of complex navigation and behaviour, experiencing suffering caused almost entirely by human activities. The fact that recovery is demonstrably possible when threats are reduced makes the ongoing failure to address plastic pollution, bycatch, and coastal development a preventable welfare failure at scale.