Mink farms are disease amplification environments with both endemic welfare problems and pandemic risk. Disease burden in farmed mink represents significant welfare harm at massive scale.
Mink farm disease welfare involves the suffering of individual animals experiencing progressive infectious disease alongside the acute welfare harm of mass killing operations during outbreak control. Aleutian Disease causes chronic immune system dysfunction — affected mink experience progressive debilitation over months before death. During COVID-19 outbreaks, healthy mink were killed alongside infected individuals in mass culling operations using carbon dioxide gassing that, while intended to be rapid, causes distress and requires good protocol compliance to minimize suffering. The disease amplification environment of mink farms — high density, genetic uniformity, chronic stress — creates both the conditions for endemic disease and the vulnerability to novel pathogen outbreaks that make mink farms biosafety concerns as well as welfare concerns.