Wildlife corridors allow animals to move safely between fragmented habitat patches. Good corridor design reduces road mortality, inbreeding, and stress from habitat isolation.
Fragmentation imposes direct welfare costs on individual animals: road mortality is an acute welfare event occurring millions of times annually globally; dispersing individuals traversing human-dominated landscapes experience chronic stress, increased predation risk, and reduced foraging success. Animals trapped in isolated populations face inbreeding effects — reduced immune function, reproductive failure, developmental abnormalities — that cause individual suffering at the population level. Corridors that reduce road mortality and allow natural movement patterns directly improve the welfare of individual animals making dangerous dispersal journeys, and indirectly benefit populations by maintaining genetic diversity that underpins health. Infrastructure investment in wildlife crossings is therefore simultaneously a welfare and a conservation measure.