Understanding People’s Attitudes Towards Wild Animal Welfare
In the wild, animals frequently face hardships that many of us would consider terrible if they were to happen to humans. When we hear of someone starving, getting injured, being ill, or being the victim of an assault, we are quick to sympathize and perhaps even take action to help relieve their suffering. Many of us would do the same for animals who are close to humans, such as companion animals.
But what about animals living in the wild?
Wild animals frequently face harsh weather conditions, starvation, disease, injuries, and death. Increasingly, ethicists and activists are calling for the view that we should have the same empathic response to the suffering of wild animals that we have to the suffering of our fellow humans and other animals. This means we should try and reduce the suffering of wild animals, for example by providing for their basic needs via supplemental food programs to address starvation or vaccinating and healing sick wild animals.
Despite the increasing interest in addressing wild animal welfare, the topic is still a largely neglected topic, among the public, activists, and researchers interested in animal welfare. This means we don’t know very much about people’s attitudes towards wild animal welfare. We don’t know whether people’s attitudes towards wild animals differ from their attitudes towards farmed animals or companion animals. We don’t even know whether people generally support helping wild animals or whether they mostly favor leaving them alone.
At Rethink Priorities, we created a new scale to investigate people’s attitudes towards wild animal welfare. In this blog post, I’ll introduce the questions we developed and some insights we gained in the process of developing them.
The Wild Animal Welfare Scale
Researchers often refer to a collection of survey questions that measure one or more aspects of a particular topic as a scale. Many types of scales have been developed, including ones that measure animal-related attitudes.
For example, there’s the Animal Attitudes Scale by Herzog et al., which was designed to measure overall concern for animals and has items like: “I sometimes get upset when I see wild animals in cages at zoos.” Respondents are asked to indicate to what extent they agree or disagree with each item. Another example is the Speciesism Scale, which measures the view that moral concern for someone depends on the species they belong to. It has items such as: “It is morally acceptable to trade animals like possessions.” You can check out Faunalytics’ survey questions page for more examples.
Scales are useful because they make it possible to study a variety of topics. They are relatively easy to use and can assess different aspects of human psychology, such as attitudes, beliefs, and traits (e.g., personality traits). Multiple scales can be used within a single study to not just assess the results of each attitude or belief individually, but also how they relate to each other.
Academic scales are subjected to rigorous tests to make sure that the measure is both reliable and valid. This often consists of multiple research phases. Scale items are designed and pilot tested to make sure they are properly understood. Following this, they are subjected to statistical tests (e.g., factor analyses) to assess the properties and coherence of the scale. Finally, the relationship between the results of the scale are compared to other scales or measures to verify whether it confirms predictions based on what it’s supposed to measure, thereby providing evidence for its reliability and validity.
Without a formal scale development process, it’s easy to develop questions that do not measure what you intend to measure.
We set out to create the first rigorous academic-oriented scale to measure aspects of people’s wild animal welfare attitudes. Specifically, we were interested in creating a scale to measure the extent to which someone cares about wild animal welfare and to what extent they support intervening in nature to address wild animal suffering. We included both caring and intervention attitudes as separate aspects because it’s possible to care about wild animals but not necessarily support interventions in nature (e.g., you may not know about reliable interventions to help wild animals).
To possibly explain caring and intervention attitudes, we also created items to measure people’s idyllic views of nature and whether they believe interventions can be effective in reducing wild animal suffering. Some have argued that one reason people may not be concerned with the suffering of wild animals is that they may mistakenly believe that nature, if left alone, resembles a paradise where animals live happy lives. They may also believe that there is little that can be done for wild animals. By creating items to measure idyllic views of nature and beliefs about (in)effectiveness, we could see how they are related to a concern for wild animal welfare.
We conducted multiple studies to test the reliability and validity of the items we came up with. We ran pilot studies where we presented respondents with potential survey questions and asked them to both answer the question and explain their response. We used this feedback to select the most promising items.
Additionally, we conducted statistical analyses and included other animal-related scales and questions to see whether our results produced patterns consistent with what we expected to find, assuming we were measuring what we intended to measure. For example, a concern for wild animals should be negatively correlated with speciesist attitudes and positively correlated with other pro-animal attitudes.
We won’t delve into all of the details about the validity of our scale in this blog post (see our preprint for the details), although we will discuss some relevant findings related to this. Ultimately, we ended up with the following scale items:
Table 1: The Wild Animal Welfare Scale | |
Caring | |
I care about wild animals that are in pain, no matter whether their suffering is due to human or natural causes. | |
I care about the difficulties wild animals face in their natural environment, even when these are solely due to nature. | |
When I hear in the news about a natural disaster (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis), I often think about the fate of wild animals living in that area. | |
When I watch nature documentaries that show wild animals in pain, it upsets me. | |
Intervention | |
We should intervene in nature to reduce the natural hardships wild animals face. | |
Humans should take steps to try and reduce the suffering of wild animals, even when that suffering is entirely due to natural causes. | |
Humans should try to protect wild animals from natural threats such as predators and disease. | |
We should intervene in nature to help wild animals that are in pain, no matter what causes their suffering. | |
Idyllic view | |
In their natural environment, unaffected by humans, wild animals live pleasant lives. | |
As long as they are not harmed by humans, wild animals mostly live good lives in their natural habitats. | |
Wild animals generally thrive and live pleasant lives when they’re in their natural habitat. | |
The natural order ensures that wild animals live mostly good lives. | |
Ineffectiveness beliefs | |
Ecosystems are too complex to predict the outcomes of efforts aimed at improving the lives of wild animals. | |
Nothing much can be done to reduce the hardships that affect animals living in the wild. | |
It is not possible to reliably improve the lives of wild animals. | |
It is not possible to solve the problems that wild animals face in nature. |
Respondents responded to these items by indicating the extent to which they agree or disagree, on a 7-point scale, ranging from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree.”
Key Results
Below we note several results from one of the studies we conducted to validate our scale. Before going into the results, it’s important to mention the sample of respondents who participated in the survey, as the results may not necessarily translate to other samples. In our case, all respondents (N = 830) were from the United Kingdom. The majority were women (61.8%), followed by men (37.3%) and non-binary respondents (0.6%). Two respondents preferred not to answer this question (0.2%). Their average age was 38.8 (SD = 13.2).
Respondents Seem To Care About Wild Animals
Looking at one of the items designed to measure concern for wild animals (“I care about wild animals that are in pain, no matter whether their suffering is due to human or natural causes”), we see that many respondents seem to display a concern for wild animals. A majority (90%) agree with the item.
Because we measured concern for wild animals with multiple items, we can also calculate an average concern score across all four items, representing the score for the Caring subscale of our overall scale. The distribution of average scores is shown in the figure below.
Most average scores regarding a concern for wild animals fall on the right side of the graph (somewhat agree to strongly agree), indicating that a large majority of respondents displayed a concern for wild animals. The average overall Caring score was 5.38 (SD = 1.03).
Respondents Support Some Interventions To Help Wild Animals
The same analysis regarding intervention attitudes showed that respondents were relatively more split on whether or not to intervene in nature. A majority of respondents agreed with the items about intervening in nature to help wild animals, but more respondents disagreed or neither agreed or disagreed with this compared to the items about their concern for wild animals. The average across these items was 4.32 (SD = 1.20), indicating responses just above neutral on average.
Note that the intervention-related items we used as part of the Wild Animal Welfare scale were rather general and did not reference specific interventions. We also assessed support for specific interventions, such as providing for the basic needs of wild animals (e.g., supplying food and water, creating shelters) and vaccinating and healing sick wild animals. This was mainly done to see whether the average score on the general intervention items positively correlated with the responses to the specific interventions (to validate our scale), but it also produces additional insight into the kinds of interventions respondents support.
We found, for example, that support for providing for the basic needs of wild animals was very high, as well as for vaccinating and healing sick wild animals. However, support for certain other interventions, such as genetically modifying wild animals, was very low. We did not ask respondents to explain why they supported some interventions and opposed others, but it’s likely that factors such as the scale of the intervention and the possible downstream effects may have been important considerations.
Idyllic Views Were Common But Did Not Explain A Reduced Concern For Wild Animals
Regarding idyllic views about nature, we found that a majority of respondents seem to somewhat agree or agree (but not strongly agree) that wild animals live pleasant lives in nature. Their average score was 5.05 (SD = 1.04).
As mentioned earlier, one idea is that idyllic views may explain a reduced concern for wild animals. The logic is that if you think wild animals generally live very pleasant lives, there is no need to be concerned about them or intervene in nature to alleviate suffering (because they don’t suffer much). This means there should be a negative relationship between idyllic views and a concern for wild animals (and supporting intervening in nature). In contrast, if anything, we found a positive relationship: respondents who held more idyllic beliefs were also more likely to show concern for wild animals and support intervening in nature.
A possible explanation for these findings is that idyllic beliefs motivate a concern for wild animals because it means there’s hope for wild animals. If you believe that they live good lives, that’s all the more reason to care about them and make sure they are living their best lives. We did not preregister this interpretation, however, and the correlations are quite small (.19 with caring about wild animals and .18 with supporting intervening in nature).
Ineffectiveness Beliefs Are Associated With A Reduced Concern For Wild Animals
As for beliefs about the ineffectiveness of interventions, respondents seem to be unsure or are slightly optimistic about being able to help wild animals. Their average score was 3.72 (SD = 1.07).
Intervention ineffectiveness beliefs were negatively associated with both caring about wild animals (a correlation of -.29) and supporting intervening in nature (a correlation of -.35). This result is consistent with what we expected to find. In other words, the more strongly someone believed that it’s not possible to help wild animals, the less likely they were to support intervening in nature and show concern for wild animals.
Caring About Wild Animals Also Predicts Donation Behavior
Besides finding patterns in the data that support our interpretation of what our items measure, we also looked at donation behavior to validate the scale. Respondents who report caring about wild animals should be more likely to donate to a wild animal charity compared to other respondents and compared to other charities. We therefore gave respondents a choice to donate a small monetary sum to a human-oriented charity (Malaria Consortium), a farmed animal-oriented charity (The Humane League) and a wild animal-oriented charity (Wild Animal Initiative). They could also keep the money for themselves.
We found that caring for wild animals predicted the respondents’ donation decision.
As the figure shows, the more a respondent reported caring about wild animals, the more likely it was that they donated to the wild animal charity. This result is important because it further supports the validity of the scale and also shows the scale can be used to predict important outcomes, such as donation behavior.
Summary
At Rethink Priorities, we set out to develop a scale to measure attitudes related to wild animal welfare. The Wild Animal Welfare Scale consists of multiple items that measure different aspects of wild animal welfare, including a concern for wild animals, support for intervening in nature, idyllic views of nature, and intervention ineffectiveness beliefs.
Our work so far has revealed some findings that may be of interest to people concerned about wild animal welfare. We’ve shown that many respondents report caring about wild animals and that they support interventions in nature, although support varies between different specific interventions.
We did not find evidence that idyllic views about nature explain a reduced concern for wild animals. Instead, we found a weakly positive relationship between idyllic views and wild animal concerns.
Finally, we found that caring about wild animals, as measured with our scale, predicts donating to a wild animal charity.
While we found some preliminary results that address outstanding questions in the field of animal welfare, much more work remains to be done. We hope that our scale will be used by others to conduct further research on the attitudes and beliefs surrounding wild animal welfare.
For more detailed information, see our preprint in which we report more analyses and provide a more in-depth discussion of the results.
Want To Know More About Wild Animal Welfare?
If you want to know more about the topic of wild animal welfare, take a look at charities such as Animal Ethics and Wild Animal Initiative. There are also several books (e.g., Wild Animal Ethics, Animal Ethics in the Wild), articles (The Wild Frontier of Animal Welfare, The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering), a website, and a video course. Of course, you can also check out the wild animal welfare-related research conducted by Rethink Priorities.