Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has caused unprecedented mortality in wild bird populations since 2021, raising profound welfare questions about individual suffering at massive scale.
HPAI creates individual welfare suffering at an almost incomprehensible scale. Individual infected wild birds experience neurological deterioration — disorientation, seizures, inability to fly or swim — followed by death within days. The speed of progression means suffering duration per individual is relatively brief, but the numbers affected — hundreds of millions — make the aggregate welfare impact enormous. Seabird colonies where chicks starve after both parents die of HPAI represent compounded welfare harms — the suffering of the dying adults and the extended starvation of dependent chicks. Culling of domestic poultry during outbreaks, while necessary to prevent virus spread, involves welfare tradeoffs: killing methods including live gassing with CO₂ and foam suffocation raise welfare concerns about the dying experience for billions of birds.