Pumas (mountain lions) in North America face welfare challenges from habitat fragmentation, vehicle mortality, and the stress of living in increasingly human-modified landscapes.
Puma welfare in fragmented landscapes illustrates the compounding consequences of habitat isolation: an animal that needs hundreds of square kilometers to meet its prey, reproductive, and territorial requirements finds itself constrained to habitat islands where it experiences the stress of restricted range, the elevated disease risk of inbreeding, the chronic exposure to rodenticide toxins from prey, and the mortality risk of crossing fragmented highways. P-22, the Los Angeles puma, became a symbol of wildlife persistence in human-dominated landscapes, but his decade in isolation — the stress of mange, the toxin burden from rodenticide-exposed prey, the physical and physiological costs of a life in too-small a space — also illustrates the welfare costs that iconic wildlife persistence in inadequate habitat imposes on individual animals. Wildlife crossing infrastructure that restores connectivity addresses these welfare costs directly.