Brown hare leverets are born fully furred and mobile but face significant mortality from agricultural machinery, predation, and weather. Conservation of declining hare populations requires attention to leveret survival rates.
Leveret welfare involves both individual suffering and population-level decline. Leverets injured or killed by agricultural machinery suffer traumatic injuries; preventing this requires pre-cut surveys or machinery fitted with flushing bars. Leverets found apparently abandoned are normal - does leave leverets alone throughout the day to avoid drawing predator attention to them, returning only at dusk. Removing apparently orphaned leverets causes significant harm: captive hand-rearing has poor success rates, and leverets removed from their forms lose access to natural socialization and habitat learning. Genuine orphaned or injured leverets (those accompanied by an obviously dead doe, or showing visible injury) require specialist wildlife rescue expertise. Brown hare population decline represents a large-scale welfare concern at the level of millions of individuals lost from the population over decades.