Urban environments create unique challenges and opportunities for wildlife welfare. Rehabilitation of urban wildlife requires understanding the specific hazards cities pose to wild animals.
Cities generate enormous wildlife welfare problems through infrastructure, vehicles, toxicants, and habitat fragmentation, while simultaneously concentrating humans who care about animals and want to help. Urban raptors — hawks, owls, and falcons — are poisoned through eating rodenticide-contaminated prey. Waterfowl become entangled in fishing line in urban parks. Songbirds strike glass buildings. Urban rehabilitation centers address the downstream consequences of these harms, but upstream solutions — rodenticide alternatives, bird-safe building requirements, wildlife-friendly urban planning — address root causes. The concentration of sympathetic humans in cities also represents a major advocacy asset for wildlife welfare.