Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks cause severe acute welfare suffering in sheep and other cloven-hoofed livestock, and the mass culling policies used in control raise profound ethical questions.
FMD outbreaks cause acute welfare suffering at two levels: the disease itself causes painful oral and foot lesions making eating and walking extremely difficult, and the control response involving mass culling on welfare grounds prior to disease arrival causes suffering in healthy animals. The ethics of killing millions of animals, many of which would have recovered naturally, has been extensively debated since the 2001 outbreak. Modern international disease management frameworks increasingly incorporate emergency vaccination as an alternative to blanket culling, reducing the scale of killing while still controlling spread. Better early warning systems and improved rapid diagnostic tools are also reducing response time and total animal numbers affected.