Saiga antelope have experienced unprecedented mass mortality events, with veterinary and welfare science playing crucial roles in understanding, responding to, and preventing future catastrophes.
The saiga mass mortality events represent one of the most dramatic acute wildlife welfare crises in recent history — hundreds of thousands of animals dying rapidly from hemorrhagic disease across vast steppe landscapes. The suffering involved in fatal bacterial septicemia — fever, weakness, respiratory distress, and death — affected every individual in affected herds. The scale makes individual welfare assessment and intervention impossible, but the event underscores the welfare importance of population-level conservation preventing future mass mortality risks. Climate change is increasing the frequency of the unusual temperature-humidity combinations believed to trigger these events, making conservation of already-vulnerable populations increasingly urgent as a welfare as well as ecological matter.