Saiga antelopes are critically endangered steppe ungulates that have experienced catastrophic mass mortality events linked to climate-driven bacterial infection — with individual suffering on an enormous scale during these episodes.
Saiga mass mortality welfare represents one of the most dramatic and distressing wild animal welfare events documented in recent decades. In 2015, observers described fields of dead and dying saiga across hundreds of kilometres of Kazakh steppe — animals that appeared healthy in the morning were dead by afternoon, with hemorrhagic diarrhoea and respiratory distress preceding death. The speed of death for some individuals may have been relatively rapid, but others clearly suffered acute illness over hours. The scale — 200,000 animals dying within weeks — means the aggregate suffering was enormous. Calves born during the event that survived their mothers faced immediate starvation. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of the warm, humid conditions that trigger these events, meaning that a population already vulnerable from historical poaching now faces additional climate-driven catastrophic mortality risk. The welfare dimension of mass mortality events demands that they receive serious attention alongside the conservation response.