Roads kill billions of animals annually worldwide, representing one of the largest sources of directly human-caused wildlife mortality. Solutions ranging from individual behavior to infrastructure design can reduce this toll.
Road mortality causes direct, acute welfare harm to billions of animals annually: the physical trauma of vehicle impact, the deaths that follow from internal injuries when animals are not instantly killed, and the psychological states of fear and pain in the final moments of animals struck by fast-moving vehicles. Secondary welfare effects include the disruption of population social structures when key individuals (dominant males, experienced matriarchs) are removed from populations by road mortality. The welfare harm from roads is largely normalized — it happens continuously, invisibly, at speeds that prevent human observation of individual animal suffering. Treating road mortality as the welfare catastrophe it is, and advocating for infrastructure changes that reduce it, is a high-impact area where individual action aggregates to measurable change.