Urban environments host diverse wildlife populations whose welfare is shaped by human activity. Gardens, roads, and domestic cats create both hazards and opportunities for urban wildlife.
Urban wildlife welfare is shaped by a complex mix of direct human impacts and the food and shelter opportunities that urban environments provide. Road mortality is perhaps the most acute welfare problem — vehicle strikes cause traumatic injury and death to foxes, hedgehogs, badgers, owls, and many other species. Secondary rodenticide poisoning causes slow deaths from internal bleeding, often in species that are not target pests. Domestic cat predation, while debated in terms of population impact, causes direct suffering to individual prey animals. Conversely, gardens with native plants, ponds, undisturbed corners, and no pesticide use support large invertebrate populations that feed insectivorous mammals, birds, and amphibians. Simple actions by individual households can meaningfully improve urban wildlife welfare at landscape scale when adopted widely.