Wild animal welfare
Researching how to responsibly improve the wellbeing of wild animals
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Why is this a pressing problem?
There is a chance that right now many trillions or quintillions of wild animals are experiencing lives that include terrible suffering. For many animals the threat of predation is nearly constant, which, in more brutal terms, is the prospect of experiencing the horror and pain of being eaten alive. Wild animals face many other sources of suffering such as extreme weather conditions, hunger and untreated disease. In addition, the brief lifespan of many smaller-sized animals – particularly animals traditionally classified as r-strategists who produce many offspring with the expectation that most will die in infancy – suggests a small window of opportunity for any positive hedonic value to outweigh the pain of death.
Yet it seems there are things we can already do to make the lives of wild animals better. Welfare biology is a relatively new but quickly growing academic field exploring the welfare of wild animals and what we can do to improve it.
More research on wild animal welfare could involve further developing interventions for improving animal welfare. Interventions that already exist include wild animal vaccination to prevent diseases, fertility control to improve the welfare of urban wildlife, and ways of aiding animals affected by factors such as weather conditions or natural disasters. To ensure these interventions are effective, research is also needed to improve our understanding of how to measure the welfare of wild animals and how to model indirect impacts on ecosystems.
There are other, more foundational questions we need more research to answer. For example: Which animals are sentient? What kinds of affective states does an animal experience day-to-day? When should we regard the bad experiences of animals as outweighing the good? How does this vary across species? How does an animal’s lifespan connect to its wellbeing? Can we ever understand the ecosystem well enough to intervene?
Foundational research could conclude that animals don’t have a morally relevant experience, or that there is no way for us to intervene effectively – although based on our current scientific understanding, we can anticipate that many wild animals do likely suffer a great deal and there seem to already be ways we can act to improve their lives. But regardless, given the vast number of wild animals, even a very small chance that they are suffering needlessly and avoidably is worth investigating. There are probably over a thousand wild vertebrates for every human, and the number of invertebrates is orders of magnitude greater. It would be an enormous gamble to look the other way and not research this topic more.
Until recently, there were only a dozen or so researchers dedicating their lives to improving our understanding of wild animal welfare. There is still a massive research deficit, much we don’t know, and the stakes are high.
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Contributors: This introduction was last updated 10/11/2022. Thanks to Will Fenning for originally writing this introduction and Professor Oscar Horta for helpful feedback. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
