Feeding urban wildlife provides welfare benefits to food-stressed animals but can also cause disease, dependency, and behavioral changes that harm individual and population welfare.
Urban wildlife feeding sits in a complex welfare space. In winter, supplementary feeding of garden birds clearly reduces starvation mortality and provides welfare benefit. For mammals, species-appropriate supplementary feeding during cold snaps or drought can similarly provide welfare support. However, inappropriate foods cause nutritional harm, and feeding concentrations can spread disease. The welfare calculus strongly supports feeding birds in gardens with appropriate seed mixes, while being more cautious about feeding ground-dwelling mammals in ways that may increase their dependence on unreliable human food sources.