Leopards living on the edges of cities and agricultural landscapes face unique welfare challenges including snare injury, persecution, and road mortality as they navigate increasingly human-dominated environments.
Urban-edge leopards occupy a welfare frontier where the challenges of human proximity are daily realities. The chronic stress of navigating human activity, avoiding persecution, and competing with habitat loss reduces welfare in ways that are difficult to document but physiologically real. Snare injuries create permanent handicaps that reduce hunting success and may force desperate prey choices. Road mortality removes individual leopards from populations with limited connectivity. The Mumbai case demonstrates that coexistence is possible at remarkable density when human attitudes and infrastructure design support wildlife movement.