Feeding urban wildlife is widespread and controversial, with welfare benefits for individual animals offset by potential population, ecological, and disease transmission harms that depend on what and how people feed.
Urban wildlife feeding sits at the intersection of individual welfare benefit and population-level risk. For garden birds, there is reasonable evidence that well-managed feeding with appropriate food and clean feeders supports survival, particularly in winter. For mammals and waterfowl, the evidence is more complex — inappropriate food causes nutritional problems, and concentrated feeding increases disease transmission and may support unnaturally high population densities that eventually reduce welfare through increased competition and conflict. The welfare-positive approach to urban wildlife feeding involves providing species-appropriate food, maintaining feeding station hygiene, and accepting that supplementary feeding should complement rather than replace natural food availability. It also involves not feeding animals in ways that increase habituation and human-wildlife conflict.