Urban foxes have successfully colonised towns and cities across the UK, creating opportunities for human-wildlife coexistence alongside welfare challenges from vehicle collisions, mange, poison bait and human persecution.
Urban fox welfare exists in a context of human-wildlife conflict that shapes management decisions. Foxes provide genuine ecosystem services — controlling rodent populations and providing urban residents with wildlife encounters — while occasionally causing damage to gardens and disturbing chicken keepers. The welfare challenge is maintaining healthy fox populations in urban environments where they face vehicle collisions, mange, deliberate poisoning and shooting despite urban fox control having no long-term effect on population size due to rapid recolonisation. Coexistence approaches that manage attractants, protect chickens securely and treat individual foxes for mange produce better welfare and human-wildlife outcomes than lethal control.