Wildlife disease surveillance programs provide early warning of emerging diseases that cause mass mortality events in wild animal populations — and their welfare and conservation value is only growing as climate change and habitat encroachment increase disease emergence risk.
Wildlife disease surveillance serves animal welfare by enabling earlier intervention when diseases cause mass suffering in wild populations. Diseases like white-nose syndrome, chronic wasting disease, and avian influenza cause prolonged, distressing deaths in thousands of individual animals — and early detection enables responses that may limit the scale of suffering even when the disease cannot be eliminated. Surveillance also prevents secondary welfare harms from human responses to wildlife disease — targeted culling of infected populations is less destructive when disease boundaries are accurately known than when response is based on uncertain information.