Rewilding programmes that reintroduce apex predators generate significant ecological benefits, but the welfare of individual predators during reintroduction, establishment, and territorial conflict deserves explicit consideration.
Rewilding projects rightly emphasise ecological restoration — the return of natural processes, habitat complexity, and species interactions. However, the welfare of individual animals in these programmes deserves parallel consideration. Reintroduced predators face a period of extreme challenge — learning to hunt unfamiliar prey, establishing territories in competitive landscapes, and navigating human-modified habitats. Mortality rates are high and some deaths involve suffering from conflict, starvation, or injury. Welfare-informed rewilding protocol includes supplementary feeding during establishment, monitoring individual body condition alongside location data, rapid intervention when animals are injured or in difficulty, and proactive management of human-wildlife conflict to prevent retaliatory killing. These welfare considerations do not undermine rewilding goals but strengthen the ethical basis for programmes that affect identifiable individual animals.