Rewilding aims to restore natural ecological processes and self-sustaining ecosystems. Its implications for animal welfare are complex — involving both improvements and new welfare challenges.
Rewilding involves deliberate acceptance of natural welfare harms — predation, starvation, disease — in exchange for the ecological and welfare benefits of self-sustaining natural systems. Individual animals in rewilded landscapes face welfare risks that managed systems prevent. Rewilding advocates argue that the welfare of ecosystems — the aggregate of millions of animals living natural lives — outweighs the welfare cost of managing nature for individual outcomes. This represents a philosophical choice about the appropriate scale of welfare concern: individual animal welfare versus ecological welfare. There is genuine tension between welfare principles focused on individual animals and rewilding principles focused on ecological processes.