Scotland leads the UK in rewilding ambition, with successful species recoveries and emerging proposals for apex predator reintroduction transforming its ecosystems.
Scotland's rewilding trajectory demonstrates that ecosystem recovery at landscape scale is achievable within human lifetimes. Beaver reintroduction has been the most welfare-significant development: over 1,000 individual animals now live as free-ranging wild animals in Scotland after absence for 400 years. Each of these animals experiences a genuinely wild life — foraging, swimming, building, socialising and raising young in appropriate habitat — a welfare outcome incomparably better than any captive alternative. Translocation for conflict management involves acute welfare costs, but the population-level welfare gain from wild living vastly outweighs these temporary impacts.