Rewilding — restoring natural ecosystems by reintroducing apex predators and allowing natural processes to resume — has profound welfare implications for individual animals in both positive and challenging directions.
Rewilding creates genuine welfare complexity: reintroduced animals gain the positive welfare of natural environments but at the cost of predation-related welfare harms that management had suppressed. A deer in a rewilded landscape with wolves lives a more behaviorally natural life but faces genuine predation risk and the stress of living with apex predator presence. A wolf reintroduced from captivity faces territorial establishment challenges and mortality risks unknown in a zoo environment. The welfare lens does not clearly oppose rewilding — the evidence suggests that wild animals in natural ecological conditions experience better average welfare than managed populations in degraded habitats — but it does ask that the welfare costs of reintroduction and establishment be taken seriously and minimized where possible through careful species selection, release timing, and management of the establishment period.