Home gardens and community green spaces offer significant opportunities to support local wildlife through habitat creation, providing food, shelter, and connectivity that benefits animal welfare at the individual and population level.
Garden wildlife welfare is a distributed but cumulatively large welfare opportunity: individual gardens have modest direct impact, but collectively the habitat mosaic of urban and suburban gardens supports millions of individual animals. For hedgehogs, solitary animals that require access to connected foraging areas, garden fencing creates welfare-significant territory fragmentation that prevents sufficient foraging and leads to starvation. A single hedgehog hole in a fence connects two gardens to a potentially foraging-adequate territory for a family group. Garden ponds support amphibians whose populations are declining severely in many countries, with each pond potentially enabling dozens of breeding adults. The welfare impact of pesticide use on invertebrates is underappreciated: systemic insecticides kill invertebrates that birds and hedgehogs depend on, creating food web effects beyond the target pest. The cumulative welfare benefit of wildlife-friendly gardening across millions of households could be substantial.