Canada lynx are specialist predators of snowshoe hares across boreal North America. Their welfare is tightly linked to hare population cycles and climate change impacts on snowpack.
Canada lynx welfare faces several compounding threats. When snowshoe hare populations crash during population troughs, lynx starve — documented cases show emaciated, desperate lynx seeking prey in human-adjacent areas and sometimes dying of malnutrition. Climate change is degrading their competitive advantage in deep snow environments, allowing coyotes to encroach on lynx territories and further reduce prey availability. Trapping with leg-hold traps causes significant injury and pain in captured animals — trapped lynx that miss scheduled trap checks suffer for extended periods. In the contiguous US, highway mortality, habitat fragmentation, and incidental trapping (traps set for other species) compound naturally low population density. Recovery programs have used radio collaring and translocation with welfare costs from capture stress.