Red squirrel conservation involves complex welfare trade-offs between individual grey squirrel welfare and red squirrel population recovery through management interventions.
Red squirrel conservation welfare involves the ethical tension between the welfare of individual grey squirrels and the survival of red squirrel populations - a tension that lacks easy resolution. Grey squirrels killed as part of management programmes to protect red squirrel refugia experience welfare harm through trapping and killing. The welfare methods used vary: cage trapping followed by lethal injection is considered more humane than some alternatives, but the trap period involves stress and confinement. The welfare case for grey squirrel control in red squirrel refugia rests on the argument that individual grey squirrel welfare costs are outweighed by the prevention of an entire species population's collapse, and by the welfare of thousands of individual red squirrels who would otherwise contract the painful, fatal squirrelpox disease. Red squirrels infected with squirrelpox develop facial swellings, eye ulcers, and skin lesions before death - a welfare harm prevented for each red squirrel that survives in a grey-free refugium. The development of oral immunocontraception for grey squirrels would offer a welfare-superior management approach that reduces grey squirrel reproduction without killing, but remains in development.