Rewilding - restoring natural processes and species to degraded landscapes - is growing in ambition and scale, with significant implications for both ecosystem welfare and individual animal experiences.
Rewilding presents a complex welfare picture. At the ecosystem level, rewilding dramatically improves conditions for the wildlife community, enabling natural behaviour and population dynamics. At the individual animal level, it means accepting suffering from predation, starvation, disease, and weather - forms of suffering that intervention-based conservation seeks to mitigate. Compassionate conservation approaches seek to hold both perspectives: supporting rewilding's ecological benefits while remaining alert to opportunities to reduce individual suffering where this can be done without undermining natural processes.