Rewilding degraded grasslands and prairies restores habitat for native wildlife, but requires careful management to ensure good welfare outcomes for reintroduced species.
Grassland rewilding offers enormous potential welfare gains for native wildlife through habitat restoration. However, welfare considerations in rewilding projects are complex. Reintroduced animals face the stress of translocation, potentially reduced genetic diversity in founder populations, and predation pressure in environments where they may lack appropriate predator-avoidance behavior. Well-managed rewilding includes sufficient founder population size, genetic diversity screening, predator acclimation and ongoing monitoring. The welfare of individual animals in rewilded systems requires attention alongside population and ecosystem objectives. Rewilding that creates suffering for individual animals without adequate monitoring and management can fail both ethically and conservation goals.