Large-scale rewilding projects promise ecological restoration but raise complex welfare questions about suffering in natural prey-predator systems and the ethics of reintroduction.
Rewilding creates a genuine welfare tension. Wild animals in restored ecosystems experience suffering — from predation, starvation, injury, and disease — that managed systems could in principle prevent. Prey animals killed by reintroduced predators die real deaths involving real suffering. Yet captive or managed animals also suffer, often more chronically. Welfare-informed rewilding pays attention to individual animal outcomes — monitoring for disease, intervening where necessary, planning prey populations before predators are reintroduced. It does not treat wild suffering as categorically invisible.