Rewilding projects that reintroduce species and restore ecological processes offer transformative wildlife welfare benefits but also introduce welfare challenges around predator-prey dynamics and population management.
Rewilding represents a fundamentally different approach to wildlife welfare than individual-animal rescue or population management. By restoring ecological processes and allowing self-regulation, rewilding creates animal populations that can meet their needs through natural behaviour rather than human intervention. The welfare trade-offs are real: natural predation involves prey animal fear and individual killing, but the alternative - predator-free landscapes requiring intensive human management - has its own welfare costs. The welfare case for rewilding is strongest at the population level: animals in functionally complete ecosystems generally have more natural, healthier lives than those in degraded, over-managed landscapes. Rewilding is arguably the highest-leverage single intervention for improving wildlife welfare at scale.