Flying foxes are critical ecosystem engineers whose welfare is threatened by habitat loss, culling, and heat events — protecting them benefits entire forest ecosystems.
Flying fox welfare is critically connected to ecosystem welfare — these animals provide pollination and seed dispersal services that regenerate forests following disturbance, meaning their welfare decline has cascading consequences for forest-dependent species. Individual welfare threats include heat stress mortality events (direct, acute suffering and death), culling campaigns (despite limited evidence of crop damage justification), and electrocution from power infrastructure. The welfare case against culling is both ethical and ecological: removing keystone dispersers to protect orchards ignores the larger ecosystem service value and imposes welfare costs disproportionate to the horticulture benefit claimed. Heat event welfare response requires rapid wildlife rescue and cooling facilities that are chronically underfunded relative to the scale of mortality events.