How devil facial tumor disease has devastated Tasmanian devil populations and ongoing conservation and welfare responses.
Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease causes profoundly distressing welfare outcomes — the tumors grow rapidly around the mouth and face, preventing normal feeding and causing slow starvation over weeks. Each individual devil experiences this progression, and the scale of the epizootic has meant that hundreds of thousands of individuals have died this way since 1996. Conservation responses including insurance populations and vaccine development address population viability, but individual welfare during disease progression remains difficult to address at scale. Wildlife veterinarians manage welfare in insurance populations and individual cases, but wild individuals experiencing the disease face this suffering without intervention.