Wild animal welfare research with Wild Animal Initiative

Nature is beautiful and it is also brutal. Most wild animals live short lives shaped by disease, starvation, parasites, injury and cold, and there are vastly more of them than there are farmed or companion animals. Almost nobody studies their welfare as such, which is the gap this program exists to close.

Ecosystems are complex and interventions in them have a long history of backfiring. Helping one population can harm another, and an action that looks humane may make things worse in ways nobody predicted. So the near-term goal is not to intervene but to build the evidence base that would make intervening responsible: a scientific field of welfare biology, with methods, data and researchers.

The first is original research on questions like how population density affects individual welfare, how genetics shapes an animal's experience, and how welfare can be monitored in the field at all. The second is grant-making to academic researchers, which has funded work on stress biomarkers in songbirds, the evolution of sentience in octopuses, and the effects of farmland management on insects. The third is connective: bringing scattered researchers into a community that can sustain a discipline.

The organization is Wild Animal Initiative.

Canadians receive an official Canadian donation receipt for gifts made through Rethink Charity. This is early-stage, field-building work, so it depends more than most on donors willing to fund something before it is obviously working.