The suffering caused by predation in wild animals raises profound ethical questions about whether and how humans should intervene to reduce natural suffering.
Predation-related suffering is quantitatively one of the largest sources of animal suffering in the world, yet it sits in a philosophically contested space. The mainstream welfare and conservation position holds that human intervention in natural predation would be ecologically catastrophic and practically impossible at scale. Wild animal welfare researchers who are more willing to contemplate intervention nevertheless acknowledge these difficulties and focus on near-term feasible interventions rather than wholesale restructuring of ecosystems. The most defensible near-term positions are: avoiding adding to natural predation suffering through human actions, supporting research into wild animal welfare and its scale, and engaging honestly with the philosophical question of whether the naturalness of suffering reduces its moral weight. Most welfare philosophers answer: no, it does not.