When wild animals damage crops, livestock, or property, they risk retaliatory killing. Human-wildlife conflict is one of the leading threats to large carnivores and megafauna globally. Addressing it requires solutions that protect both livelihoods and wildlife welfare.
Human-wildlife conflict creates welfare harms for both wild animals and farmed animals. Wild predators killed in retaliation suffer direct physical harm. Livestock predated by carnivores experience attack, injury, and often prolonged death. Crop-raiding wildlife face harassment, injury, and killing. The most welfare-positive resolution of human-wildlife conflict addresses the economic incentives — compensating for losses, protecting livestock through non-lethal methods, and providing alternative income through wildlife tourism or carbon credits. Solutions that reduce the financial burden of wildlife on rural communities build tolerance that protects individual wild animals from retaliatory killing. Conservation organisations that invest in conflict mitigation achieve better individual animal welfare outcomes than those focused solely on anti-poaching.