River dolphins are among the most endangered mammals on Earth. Their welfare is threatened by entanglement, habitat degradation, and pollution in some of the most biodiverse freshwater systems globally.
River dolphin welfare involves the compound suffering of individual entanglement deaths and the population-level welfare crisis of species on the edge of extinction. The baiji represented the first cetacean driven to extinction by human activity — a welfare failure at the species level that cannot be undone. The remaining river dolphin species face the same trajectory unless targeted conservation action including fishing gear modification, river habitat protection, and conflict reduction with fishing communities is implemented urgently. Individual river dolphins caught in fishing nets experience drowning deaths that take minutes to occur; the scale of this mortality across thousands of animals per year represents enormous preventable suffering that gill net bans or modifications could largely eliminate.