River dolphins are among the most endangered cetaceans, confined to the increasingly degraded river systems of South Asia and South America. Their welfare is threatened by entanglement, pollution, dam construction, and illegal killing.
River dolphin welfare is acutely compromised by the multiple simultaneous threats to their freshwater habitats. Entanglement in fishing gear causes injury and drowning — deaths that involve significant suffering for animals as cognitively complex as any cetacean. Chronic exposure to pollutants in river systems affects health, reproductive function, and sensory capacity (chemical pollution can interfere with echolocation). Dam construction creates physical barriers that fragment populations and trap animals in degrading upstream or downstream sections with declining prey availability. Deliberate killing — as in the Amazon bait trade — represents a direct welfare harm that conservation enforcement struggles to address in remote river systems. The extinction of the baiji stands as a warning: river dolphin welfare crises can reach the point of no return faster than conservation responses can mobilise. Urgent investment in freshwater conservation, fishing gear modification, and dam impact mitigation is needed across all remaining river dolphin range.