Brood management trial schemes for hen harriers aim to reduce game bird predation while protecting breeding harriers. The welfare implications of this management approach are complex and contested.
The brood management approach creates welfare implications for individual harriers at every stage: disturbance of breeding adults during chick removal, captive rearing that must maintain appropriate wild behaviour, and welfare risks during reintroduction. Whether these individual welfare costs are justified by population-level benefits is a genuinely contested question that requires transparent evidence and monitoring.