What’s Required For Wild Animal Welfare Interventions To Be Effective
Wild animals vastly outnumber domesticated animals, with especially large populations of fishes, insects, and other invertebrates. These animals face many challenges, from both human activities and natural threats. Humans kill wild animals directly and encroach on, fragment, and degrade habitats. Natural threats like extreme weather, disease, and resource competition are also prevalent. Despite these widespread threats, wild animal welfare receives much less attention compared to companion and farmed animals. This inadequate level of awareness may stem from a lack of understanding about how to effectively improve wild animal welfare.
This report presents a framework for what is required for human interventions to successfully improve wild animal welfare. The author proposes that three “preconditions” should be satisfied for interventions to effectively improve the welfare of wild animals: valid measurement, technical ability, and stakeholder buy-in
- Valid Measurement: Accurately measuring wild animal welfare is crucial for evaluating the urgency of future interventions and the success of previous approaches.
In any given ecosystem, a critical consideration is determining which species are sentient. This is difficult to estimate but important for deciding where to direct interventions. If we’re confident of a species’ capacity for welfare, the next step is to measure that welfare. Techniques for wild animals are less developed than those for animals in captivity as the wild presents unique challenges, such as a lack of controlled settings and the need to consider invertebrates, which are often excluded from previous studies that focused primarily on mammals.
Assessing wild animal welfare on a large scale requires assessing total welfare both over an animal’s entire lifetime and within regions/ecosystems containing many species. Developing a sense of the overall quality of life of wild animals opens additional questions that, in some cases, we can’t currently answer. For example, many wild animals, including insects and small vertebrates, have very short lives. How positive are their relatively short life experiences? And how much suffering does death cause relative to the total welfare experienced up to this point? Future work to answer such questions is critical.
As mentioned, scaling up also requires considering the net welfare of all members of an ecosystem. Interventions to improve the well-being of one species can directly or indirectly affect many others. Therefore, it’s crucial to measure how life will change for not only the target species but others that may be impacted.
- Technical Ability: Being able to successfully implement welfare interventions is the second requirement. To be successful, the author suggests interventions need to be effective, scalable, selective, and reversible.
The effectiveness of an intervention refers to the extent that it improves the welfare of the target species. Vaccination initiatives, for example, are only effective if a significant proportion of animals ingest or accept the vaccine. In addition, interventions should affect many animals, and hence be scalable. Scalability is, however, challenging and can be at the expense of effectiveness. For example, injections may be the most effective method to vaccinate an individual animal, but this is difficult to scale to large populations. Oral vaccinations may be more scalable – e.g., if they are airdropped in large quantities – but less effective individually. Lastly, selective interventions minimize unintended consequences, and, in reversible interventions, the main impacts (and unforeseen, unintended consequences) can be reversed.
- Stakeholder Buy-In: The final precondition is securing support from key stakeholders, like governments and the public. This includes encouraging collaboration to advance welfare interventions and addressing the concerns of those who could block them. Researchers need to work on wild animal welfare so that our measurement and intervention abilities can progress to the levels needed for implementation. Many interventions are expensive so financial buy-in is needed from governments and fundraisers.
As mentioned, those with the power to block interventions must consent. Most obviously, current laws may prohibit certain interventions. The public, along with social movements, may also oppose interventions within natural ecosystems. To increase buy-in, one approach is to highlight overlaps between stakeholders’ concerns (e.g., human health) and the interests of wild animals. Another is to try and shift stakeholders’ opinions to be more agreeable to interventions. Tailoring strategies and communication to specific to stakeholder groups can also be key to gaining support for these efforts.
Overall, our capability for large-scale wild animal welfare interventions is relatively underdeveloped. Hence, throughout this report, the author highlights our lack of solutions to many of the issues needed to satisfy the three preconditions. Despite this, the framework is valuable for highlighting research needs, contextualizing the work of current wild animal welfare organizations, and guiding efforts towards satisfying these preconditions. It may also provide advocates with ideas on how they can contribute personally, even if helping wild animals on a large scale seems daunting.
