Japanese macaques are the northernmost non-human primates and famous for bathing in hot springs. Their welfare is affected by agricultural conflict, feeding tourism, and habitat compression.
Japanese macaque welfare involves tensions between conservation, tourism, and human-wildlife conflict. Provisioning at hot spring resorts creates artificially dense aggregations that elevate social stress and alter natural behavior — welfare costs that are often overlooked in the focus on tourist accessibility. Agricultural conflict drives lethal removal of individual macaques, representing preventable welfare harm. Electric fencing and other crop protection measures can reduce conflict-driven mortality while protecting agricultural livelihoods. Providing natural foraging habitat rather than concentrated food handouts allows more naturalistic social grouping that reduces chronic stress in wild troops.