Saiga antelope face catastrophic population crashes from disease, poaching and climate stress, with mass mortality events causing enormous welfare suffering at population scale.
Saiga antelope welfare involves both the acute suffering of mass mortality events and the chronic welfare compromise of populations living under persistent poaching pressure. The 2015 die-off caused suffering at a scale almost unimaginable — hundreds of thousands of animals dying from hemorrhagic septicemia within days. Individual animal death from Pasteurella infection involves significant suffering before death. The connection between climate change and disease triggering creates a future in which such catastrophic welfare events may become more frequent. Conservation interventions that reduce poaching pressure and monitor population health enable earlier disease detection that can inform management responses in future events.