As cities expand, wildlife increasingly lives alongside humans. Understanding and managing these interactions humanely is essential for both animal welfare and human wellbeing.
Urban wildlife faces welfare challenges that are almost entirely human-created. Road collisions cause acute traumatic injuries and death. Anticoagulant rodenticides cause prolonged, painful internal bleeding in non-target predators. Light pollution disrupts sleep and reproductive cycles. Food access to human waste creates nutritional imbalances and disease risk. Animals 'habituated' to humans and subsequently euthanized as 'problem' animals represent a tragic welfare failure - they were shaped by human behavior and then killed for it. Urban wildlife welfare requires systemic change in how cities are designed and managed, not just responses to individual problem animals.