Saiga antelopes experienced one of the most dramatic population collapses in wildlife history in 2015, losing over 200,000 individuals in weeks. Conservation and welfare efforts have enabled partial recovery.
Saiga welfare is shaped by the interplay of historical poaching pressure, climate-driven disease risk, and their complex mass aggregation behaviour. Mass mortality events cause enormous acute suffering across entire populations simultaneously — thousands of animals showing severe haemorrhagic disease symptoms within hours. Individual welfare during such events is largely beyond intervention capacity; the welfare imperative is prevention through climate policy and habitat management that reduces the frequency of trigger conditions. At the individual level, anti-poaching enforcement protects animals from the acute suffering of illegal hunting. The recovery of saiga populations from near-extinction demonstrates what concerted conservation effort can achieve, but the ongoing climate threat requires continued vigilance.