Surveillance programmes for diseases that cross between animals and humans create welfare implications for wild and domestic animals through trapping, testing, and sometimes culling.
Zoonotic disease surveillance sits at the interface of human health, animal health, and animal welfare, and the welfare costs of surveillance and control programmes are frequently underweighted against biosecurity objectives. Wildlife trapping for surveillance causes acute welfare harm that can be reduced through trap design improvements and minimised holding periods. Disease control through culling often represents the path of least human institutional resistance rather than the most effective or welfare-proportionate intervention. Vaccination programmes, habitat management, and farm biosecurity typically deliver comparable or superior disease control with less animal suffering.