Saiga antelopes experienced catastrophic mass mortality events in 2015 and 2022. Understanding these events reveals how climate and disease interact to cause population-scale welfare harms.
Mass die-off events represent extraordinary acute welfare harm — tens of thousands of animals dying within days from a rapidly progressing bacterial infection causing systemic hemorrhage. Individual animals experience severe acute illness before death. The events are climate-linked and therefore not directly manageable through conventional wildlife intervention at population scale. However, reducing background stressors (poaching pressure, habitat fragmentation, human disturbance during calving) may increase population resilience to future climate-triggered disease events.