The saiga antelope is one of the most dramatic conservation stories of recent decades — recovering from near-collapse after Soviet-era hunting, then experiencing catastrophic mass mortality events linked to climate-driven disease.
Saiga welfare encompasses both the chronic challenges of life in a harsh, variable environment and acute catastrophic events. Mass mortality events — in which tens or hundreds of thousands of animals die within days — represent extreme welfare emergencies at a scale almost unprecedented in wild animal populations. The 2015 event killed 200,000 saigas within days; affected animals died of haemorrhagic septicaemia — a rapid and acutely distressing disease. The impossibility of intervention at this scale means that preventing the climatic conditions that trigger such events, through greenhouse gas reduction, is the most effective long-term welfare strategy. Poaching remains a chronic welfare threat: males are killed for their horns (used in traditional medicine), removing breeding males and distorting sex ratios that affect reproductive success. Conservation partnerships with local communities that provide economic alternatives to poaching have produced meaningful population recovery in Kazakhstan.