Marine debris — particularly plastic — causes significant welfare harm to seabirds through ingestion, entanglement, and the indirect effects of toxin exposure from accumulated plastics.
Seabird welfare and marine plastic intersect in the most intimate way possible — parents feeding plastic to chicks who die with stomachs full of colorful fragments they cannot digest. The welfare harm is direct, measurable, and ongoing. Adult birds experience false satiation from plastic loads, malnutrition as genuine food is displaced, and toxic exposure that compounds across trophic levels. These are not distant or uncertain harms — they are documented in thousands of individual birds examined across ocean basins worldwide. Reducing plastic production and ocean entry is simultaneously an ecological and animal welfare imperative.