Rewilding initiatives restore ecosystems by reintroducing missing species and allowing natural processes to resume. The welfare implications of rewilding — for reintroduced, existing, and displaced animals — deserve careful attention.
Rewilding welfare involves multiple animal populations: the reintroduced animals who undergo capture and translocation, the existing prey animals who experience changed predation pressure, and any animals displaced by ecological competition as natural processes resume. Reintroduced animals face welfare costs from handling, transport, and adaptation to new environments. The conservation rationale for accepting these costs is usually strong — but they are real costs deserving acknowledgment and minimization through skilled handling, welfare monitoring, and post-release support. The broader ecological welfare changes — prey animals experiencing higher predation pressure as predators return — are more philosophically complex: are these welfare harms that rewilding causes, or natural welfare conditions that rewilding restores? The welfare-positive case for rewilding ultimately rests on the long-term welfare of more animals living in ecologically complete systems than in degraded ones.