Diseases affecting wildlife populations cause welfare suffering at both individual and population levels, with management interventions carrying their own welfare implications.
Wildlife disease management involves genuine tension between the welfare of individual animals suffering from disease and the population and ecosystem level welfare implications of disease spread and intervention. Culling programmes that kill healthy animals to reduce disease transmission cause direct welfare harm to prevent larger-scale suffering. Vaccination programmes avoid this tension but require significant investment in delivery mechanisms. The badger culling controversy illustrates how wildlife disease management intersects with agricultural economics, welfare science, and conservation - and how contested these decisions become when welfare values are weighed against other interests. Welfare science should inform all wildlife disease management decisions, ensuring that intervention methods are compared on welfare grounds alongside effectiveness.