The saiga antelope has experienced dramatic population collapses from disease and poaching, with welfare impacts at both individual and population scale during catastrophic mortality events.
The 2015 saiga die-off was one of the most acute wildlife welfare events in recent history: hundreds of thousands of animals dying over a few weeks from hemorrhagic septicemia, a rapid and distressing cause of death. The welfare dimension of mass mortality events is often invisible in conservation framing, which focuses on population numbers. But each of those 200,000 animals experienced individual suffering — difficulty breathing, weakness, collapse — before death. Climate change is making such events more likely, creating a direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and large-scale wildlife welfare impacts. The recovery of protected subpopulations demonstrates that conservation investment works; sustaining it requires ongoing political will and international coordination.