Southern cassowaries are critical rainforest ecosystem engineers in Australia and New Guinea, facing habitat loss and vehicle strikes that cause significant individual welfare harm and threaten their ecological role.
Cassowaries injured in vehicle strikes suffer severe trauma — their heavy body and powerful legs make collision injuries often fatal or severely debilitating. Injured cassowaries that survive initial collision may be unable to forage and face slow death from starvation in remote areas. Dog attacks on chicks and juveniles cause acute suffering and are a preventable welfare harm requiring community responsibility. Habituation to human food sources leads cassowaries into increasingly dangerous human-wildlife interface situations. Their welfare and conservation are inseparable — losing individual cassowaries diminishes the seed dispersal network on which the rainforest depends.