How rewilding projects that restore predator-prey relationships affect individual animal welfare and how welfare thinking integrates with ecological restoration goals.
Rewilding confronts animal welfare thinking with one of its hardest challenges: natural predation causes individual suffering that is simultaneously ecologically necessary. Prey animals that are caught and killed by restored predators experience genuine fear and pain. Yet predator absence creates its own welfare harms through disease, starvation, and reproductive stress in overcrowded ungulate populations. The welfare-optimal outcome is not predator elimination but ecologically balanced systems where individual welfare harms from predation are minimised through natural fear effects that keep prey animals alert and distributed, while population regulation prevents the greater harms of overcrowding and resource depletion.