Entanglement in fishing gear is a leading cause of injury and death for large whales globally. The welfare suffering of entangled whales can last months before rescue or death.
Whale entanglement is among the most prolonged welfare emergencies documented for any wild animal. Whales drag heavy fishing gear for weeks or months, with lines cutting through blubber and muscle as they struggle. The combination of drag-induced exhaustion, open infected wounds, and progressive starvation creates sustained suffering at a scale affecting hundreds of thousands of individuals annually. Disentanglement programs save individual whales but cannot address the scale of the problem without transition to ropeless fishing technologies.