How Cities Can Better Protect Urban Wild Animals

From raccoons to coyotes to pigeons to deer, cities share their streets, parks, and buildings with countless wild animals. Yet when conflicts arise, local governments have historically responded with reactive, often lethal measures that cause significant animal suffering and frequently fail on their own terms. This policy brief from researchers at New York University, Yale Law School, and Stanford Law School makes the case that wild animals deserve explicit consideration in local policy — not only because doing so benefits humans, but because these animals are sentient beings with interests of their own.

The brief is intended primarily for local governments in the U.S., though its examples draw on cities of different sizes and political contexts across North America and Europe. It builds on a prior brief focused on land use and infrastructure, turning here to the question of conflict: how it arises, what sustains it, and what cities can do about it.

One of the brief’s key moves is to expand how human-wildlife conflict is defined. Rather than limiting the term to situations where wild animals harm humans, the authors argue it should encompass harms running in both directions, including cases where human activity harms wild animals, even unintentionally. A bird killed by flying into a window, a raptor poisoned by a rodenticide meant for their prey, a coyote forced into a neighborhood by habitat loss — these are all human-wildlife conflicts, the authors contend, even where no person is directly harmed.

Understanding where conflicts come from is essential to addressing them. The brief identifies several overlapping drivers:

• Urban growth that pushes wild animals into human spaces and vice versa;
• Built infrastructure that inadvertently attracts or endangers animals;
• Policy and enforcement gaps that default to reactive, often harmful responses;
• Public attitudes and misunderstandings about particular species; and
• Broad environmental pressures including climate change.

Conflicts also vary in how entrenched they’ve become. Some involve simple disputes that practical interventions can address. Others are rooted in accumulated frustration or deeply held values, requiring trust-building and community engagement alongside technical fixes.

Guiding Principles

Nine guiding principles organize the brief’s approach to welfare-centered conflict management. These include:

• Treating wild animals as sentient beings whose interests warrant consistent consideration across species, not just charismatic ones;
• Actively minimizing harm and seeking interventions that serve human and animal goals at the same time;
• Prioritizing prevention over reaction and coexistence over control;
• Choosing language carefully, as terms like “pest,” “nuisance,” and “invasive” can justify harsher responses than the evidence supports;
• Grounding decisions in the best available science while remaining willing to adapt as new evidence emerges;
• Communicating openly about wildlife policy and treating public education and engagement as core components of effective conflict management rather than add-ons; and
• Centering equity, recognizing that conflict and the costs of management fall unevenly across communities.

Policy Options

The bulk of the brief catalogs specific local policy options organized across five domains.

Waste Management And Food Access

Here, the authors highlight mandatory waste containerization, regulation of outdoor composting, smart bin technology for public trash cans, and feeding restrictions paired with public education and practical alternatives — pointing to examples from New York, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, and Toronto.

Humane Population Management

The brief critiques the default of lethal control, which is frequently ineffective or even counterproductive, and causes significant animal suffering. Alternatives include phasing out rodenticides and glue traps and piloting fertility control and reproductive disruption programs. To reduce reliance on chemical controls, the brief suggests integrated pest management, supporting natural predators like owls, hawks, and coyotes, and regulating trap-neuter-return for community cats. The latter two require careful attention to welfare tradeoffs, however. New York’s rat contraceptive pilot, the more than 20 Massachusetts municipalities that have restricted second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, and Calgary’s Coyote Conflict Response Guide that prioritizes non-lethal hazing are among the examples featured.

Conflict Response And Rehabilitation

The authors emphasize the value of integrating wildlife calls into existing 311 systems, publicly funding licensed wildlife rehabilitators, and establishing humane eviction standards that prevent the most common forms of harm when animals must be removed from structures. Washington, D.C.’s Wildlife Protection Act, which sets binding humane standards for commercial wildlife control providers, is highlighted as a particularly developed model.

Built Environment And Land Use

This section addresses bird-window collisions, artificial light pollution, road mortality, and structural deterrents — arguing that wildlife-inclusive design choices made at the planning stage can prevent conflict before it arises. Examples include Palo Alto’s recommendation that property owners screen off entrances to their home and basement, cap chimneys, and prune overhanging tree branches; Concord’s four wildlife underpasses that connect fragmented forest areas; and New York’s requirement that most new construction and major roof replacements install a green roof system (among other options) to support urban habitat.

Planning And Governance

The authors argue that lasting progress requires institutional structures: formal coexistence plans, dedicated staff positions, codification of welfare standards in law, community engagement, and inter-city collaboration so that what works in one place can spread. Certification and pledge programs like the Wild Neighbors Pledge, Bee City USA, and the Mayors’ Monarch Pledge offer cities low-barrier entry points for formalizing wildlife-friendly commitments and connecting with peer networks.

The authors acknowledge real constraints. The science of wild animal welfare is still developing, and the net effects of many interventions remain uncertain. Local governments face limited budgets, fragmented responsibility, varied public attitudes toward urban wildlife, and state or federal preemption in some areas. The brief responds to these constraints not by minimizing them but by arguing that uncertainty should prompt adaptive, evidence-generating policies rather than paralysis — and that many welfare-aligned interventions also serve human interests, making them easier to justify.

For animal advocates, this brief is significant in several ways. First, it demonstrates that the treatment of wild animals in cities is a policy domain, not just a series of one-off responses to conflict — and that advocates can engage with it as such, pushing for coexistence plans, humane standards in city code, and institutional homes for wild animal welfare in municipal government.

Second, the brief’s insistence that wild animals deserve consideration regardless of species popularity is a direct challenge to the double standard that protects some animals while subjecting others to mass extermination. Rats and pigeons are wild animals too, and a welfare-centered approach requires confronting the cultural and rhetorical machinery that makes their suffering invisible.

Third, the policy menu the brief provides is genuinely usable: advocates can identify which tools are already available in their jurisdiction, which cities have successfully implemented them, and what the policy ask looks like. The existence of models like London, Ontario’s Humane Urban Wildlife Conflict Policy, Chicago’s Wildlife Management and Coexistence Plan, and New York’s Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare shows that this work isn’t aspirational — it’s already happening.

This summary was drafted by a large language model (LLM) and closely edited by our Research Library Manager for clarity and accuracy. As per our AI policy, Faunalytics only uses LLMs to summarize very long reports (~50+ pages) that are not appropriate to assign to volunteers, studies that contain graphic descriptions of animal cruelty or animal industries, and research on niche topics. We remain committed to bringing you reliable data, which is why any AI-generated work will always be reviewed by a human.