Urban wildlife including foxes, raccoons, deer, and coyotes increasingly share space with humans. Coexistence approaches that modify human behavior reduce conflict and improve welfare for both wildlife and people.
Urban wildlife welfare is complex because the welfare of individual wild animals and the human tolerance that enables their presence are interdependent. Urban animals that become food-conditioned through human feeding often face increased welfare risks from human conflict, disease from concentrated feeding stations, and behavioral changes that reduce their ability to function as wild animals. True coexistence that benefits wildlife welfare requires managing human behavior — securing food waste, avoiding intentional feeding, installing wildlife-safe infrastructure — rather than managing wildlife populations through lethal control. The animals that live in our cities are sentient beings navigating a human-created landscape; our welfare obligations to them include designing that landscape to minimize the suffering our presence causes.