Winter poses severe survival challenges for wildlife, involving starvation, cold stress, and injury that cause significant suffering at population scale in temperate and arctic regions.
Wild animal suffering in winter is vast in scale but largely invisible to human society. Millions of mammals and birds experience cold, hunger, and exhaustion annually in ways that cause genuine suffering. Unlike disease or predation, winter starvation is slow and prolonged. While this suffering is natural and part of normal ecological processes, its scale is relevant to any comprehensive consideration of animal welfare in the world. Climate change is altering winter severity patterns in ways that may increase or decrease suffering in complex and regionally variable ways.