The 2015 saiga mass die-off and subsequent recovery attempts offer lessons about managing welfare emergencies in wild populations.
The 2015 saiga die-off confronts us with a welfare situation of almost incomprehensible scale — 200,000 animals dying from respiratory failure over three weeks across the Kazakh steppe. The individual welfare of animals experiencing the bacterial pneumonia-like presentation of Pasteurella infection — fever, difficulty breathing, progressive collapse — is clear, and it was experienced simultaneously by hundreds of thousands of individuals. The response capacity for such events is limited by their speed, scale, and remote location. Post-event analysis has improved understanding of the climatic triggers, enabling better forecasting. The population's remarkable recovery capacity — large social herbivores can rebuild numbers quickly — offers hope, but climate change increasing trigger-event frequency is a deepening welfare threat.