Rewilding initiatives restore natural processes including predation and grazing at landscape scale. Understanding the welfare implications of rewilding helps advocates engage with this powerful conservation approach.
Rewilding and animal welfare intersect in complex ways. Rewilding restores ecological function that benefits ecosystem-level biodiversity, but individual animals in rewilded landscapes experience the welfare realities of natural processes - predation, competition, starvation during harsh winters, disease. From a welfare perspective, rewilding accepts natural suffering as preferable to the welfare compromises of managed, intensive systems - an argument with significant merit but also genuine limits. The welfare of individual animals experiencing severe natural suffering remains morally relevant even in rewilded contexts. The most defensible position acknowledges both the conservation value of rewilding and the continuing relevance of individual animal welfare within it.