Gharials are critically endangered crocodilians reduced to fewer than 300 breeding adults, surviving only in a few Indian river systems where habitat degradation and fishing net entanglement continue to threaten their recovery.
Gharials face welfare harms from both direct and indirect human impacts. Fishing net entanglement causes drowning in animals that must surface to breathe — a suffocation death that may take minutes of struggling. Sand mining of nesting beaches destroys eggs before they hatch and disturbs nesting females. Captive rearing for release, while essential for population recovery, involves raising animals in artificial conditions before release into increasingly degraded rivers. The extreme rarity of the species means that each individual welfare event — each drowned juvenile, each destroyed nest — represents a significant proportion of global reproductive output. Conservation of the gharial depends on protecting both the animals and the river habitat they require.