Rewilding — restoring natural processes and keystone species — has major implications for wild animal welfare. Understanding these interactions helps develop welfare-conscious rewilding practice.
Rewilding offers major ecological benefits but raises genuine welfare questions. Natural processes involve extensive suffering — predation, starvation, disease, and competition for resources cause pain and death to vast numbers of wild animals. The welfare-conscious rewilding advocate acknowledges this tension rather than dismissing it. Some argue that wild animal welfare considerations support limited, humane interventions (treating disease, managing suffering) within rewilded areas rather than complete non-intervention. The debate between naturalistic non-intervention and welfare-motivated management of wild animals is one of the most interesting in applied animal ethics.