Urban foxes are a success story of wildlife adaptation to human environments, but they also face welfare challenges including road mortality, mange, and persecution that coexistence approaches can reduce.
Urban foxes occupy an interesting welfare position — animals that have successfully colonised human-modified environments and are protected by general wildlife legislation, but also experience significant welfare challenges specific to urban life. Road mortality causes both acute and prolonged suffering in injured animals. Mange outbreaks in dense urban populations cause intense itching, hair loss, and eventually death in untreated animals, though mange can be treated in individual foxes by concerned residents. Deliberate poisoning and persecution by residents who view foxes as pests causes additional welfare harm. Coexistence approaches that reduce conflict — securing bins, not feeding foxes in ways that concentrate populations, and educating communities about fox behaviour — reduce both the conditions that create conflict and the persecution that results from it.