Leopards increasingly share landscapes with human settlements, creating conflict that threatens both animal welfare and human safety.
Urban and peri-urban leopards face chronic welfare pressures: snare injuries, road collisions, poison-bait incidents, and stress from constant human proximity. Animals caught in snares intended for bushmeat suffer prolonged pain and often require limb amputation to survive. Retaliatory killings by communities protecting livestock inflict rapid but unplanned deaths and fragment social structures. Welfare-positive coexistence strategies tackle the economics of conflict — compensating for livestock losses, securing herds at night, and building community benefit from leopard presence through tourism — reducing the drivers of both suffering and killing.