Prey animals live under constant threat assessment. Understanding how chronic fear affects wildlife welfare reveals that predator presence has welfare costs beyond direct predation mortality.
The ecology of fear reveals that wild animal welfare cannot be assessed purely through mortality statistics or obvious injury. Prey animals living under chronic predation threat experience physiological stress that impairs immune function, reduces reproductive success, and accelerates biological aging — all welfare costs that are invisible in any snapshot observation but accumulate across lifetimes. This does not mean predator-prey relationships are welfare disasters that should be managed away; the solution of eliminating predators creates its own cascade of welfare and ecological problems. Rather, understanding fear ecology clarifies that wild animal welfare involves chronic conditions of their ecological context, not just acute suffering events, and that ecological complexity supports both species diversity and rich behavioral lives even when those lives involve fear.