Straw-coloured fruit bats form some of the largest mammal aggregations on Earth, creating both spectacular wildlife events and significant human-wildlife conflict welfare concerns.
Wild straw-coloured fruit bat welfare is affected primarily by hunting pressure at roosting aggregations. Shooting into dense roosts causes mass injury — bats fall injured, and many die slowly from wounds. The scale of hunting at major roosts can involve hundreds of thousands of animals per season, creating welfare harms at a scale comparable to industrial animal agriculture. Lethal control as crop pests causes similar acute harms. Community conservation programmes that provide alternative livelihoods to bushmeat hunters while protecting major roosts represent the most effective welfare intervention at scale. Ecotourism at Kasanka generates revenue that incentivises conservation over hunting.