UK roads cause enormous mortality and welfare harm to mammals from badgers to hedgehogs to deer, with targeted mitigation measures offering proven reductions in animal deaths.
Road mortality for wildlife mammals represents a pervasive and largely invisible welfare harm. Unlike diseases or predation, road deaths are entirely human-caused and substantially preventable. Badgers killed on roads die from trauma over minutes to hours; hedgehogs rolled into defensive positions are killed by multiple vehicles; deer struck by cars sustain massive trauma injuries and often suffer prolonged deaths before being found. The cumulative welfare cost across millions of mammals killed on UK roads annually is enormous. Investment in mitigation at wildlife road mortality hotspots — identified through systematic surveying — would prevent vast amounts of preventable suffering.