A case study in cost-effectiveness
A government program to vaccinate raccoons against rabies offers a glimpse into what’s possible.
August 6, 2025
What makes early research in wild animal welfare science so exciting — or frustrating, depending on who you ask — is that we don't know exactly where it will lead. We’re asking questions precisely because we don’t know the answers.
Still, it’s reasonable to ask whether this will all be worth it. Wild systems are complicated and, by definition, not entirely under human control. Many present-day efforts to help wild animals — treating severe injuries, for instance — are highly resource intensive and hard to scale. Does that mean wildlife management aimed at improving welfare is hopelessly expensive?
We don’t think so, for a few reasons: There are lots of wild animals; humans are already affecting them so much that minor policy changes could have huge effects; the historic neglectedness of this issue means that there are probably some relatively easy wins available; scaling current technologies can bring down costs; and inventing new technologies can open new possibilities.
We think these reasons are compelling, but we also know that they’re speculative. To check our rationale against some real-world data, we thought we’d quickly run the numbers on the cost-effectiveness of a wildlife management program that could work as a proxy for the kinds of interventions we’d like to see more of.
Rabies vaccines for wild mammals
Rabies is a viral disease that is nearly 100% fatal once symptoms appear. For humans and many other mammals it affects, it seems to be among the more painful causes of death, causing progressively intense symptoms over several days, including hyperactivity, violent convulsions, inability to swallow, and partial paralysis.
With the widespread vaccination of people and pets, rabies now resides primarily in wild animal populations. To reduce its prevalence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture partners with health departments in several states to distribute oral rabies vaccines (ORV) that are safe and effective for various terrestrial mammal species. Millions of doses are dropped from helicopters into forests and other natural areas each year. Although the program seems primarily motivated by human interests, it also directly benefits the wild animals being vaccinated.
We chose to highlight this example because it has many of the hallmarks of a promising intervention: It targets a source of intense suffering, it can potentially help a large number of animals (i.e., its benefits aren’t limited to threatened or endangered species), it can be deployed over large areas with relatively little human labor, and it uses technology that’s already affordable enough to be government-funded.
So when we refer to large-scale, cost-effective interventions, this vaccination program is the kind of thing we’re thinking of. But we also think it’s on the lower end of the cost-effectiveness spectrum for what will ultimately be possible. As wild animal welfare science advances, we expect to find ways to improve cost-effectiveness by several orders of magnitude, including by prioritizing the most tractable issues, designing interventions with wild animal welfare specifically in mind, and refining and scaling technologies and methodologies.
A back-of-the-envelope estimate of cost-effectiveness
We treated this as a rough thought experiment, not a rigorous research project. We narrowed our scope to raccoons in Texas, and, in order to piece together the little data we could find, we had to make a lot of assumptions. You can see all our calculations, assumptions, and references in this Guesstimate model, but here’s an overview of the key points:
We estimate that about 35% of raccoon deaths in Texas were attributable to rabies before the ORV program started in 1995. If Texas had a stable population of 3 million raccoons with an average lifespan of 2.5 years (i.e., 40% of them die each year), then about 420,000 raccoons were dying of rabies in Texas each year.
We couldn’t find any data on outcomes specific to Texas, so let’s assume the program reduced rabies by 70% by 2021, which is how much rabies declined nationwide during the same period (a conservative estimate, because it includes some areas with ORV programs and many without). That would mean that, by the end of the period between 1995–2021, 294,000 fewer raccoons were dying from rabies in Texas each year. Because this decline was roughly linear, we’ll say that the average number of rabies deaths averted per year (RDA/yr) over the period was simply the average of the start point (0 RDA/yr) and the end point (294,000 RDA/yr): 147,000 RDA/yr.
Given that the program costs about $2.3 million dollars per year, that would mean the average cost of preventing one raccoon from dying of rabies (and suffering greatly along the way) would be $15.64. Accounting for the asymmetry in our uncertainties bumps the price tag up to around $20, because there are more ways for this benefit to cost more than there are for it to cost less (see our model, which produces slightly different results each time because it introduces random variation into the calculation).
Just a starting point
It’s important to stress just how rough that estimate is. Our model is intentionally crude, and the data we put into it left much to be desired. Our estimate could easily be off by a couple orders of magnitude in either direction.
As statisticians love to say: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The purpose of this model isn’t to determine the exact cost of sparing a raccoon from rabies, or to compare ORV against other wild animal welfare interventions — it’s to check whether it’s reasonably possible that wild animal welfare science could lead to the development of highly cost-effective interventions. Whatever the true value of ORV programs is today, we should expect it to be on the low end of what could be accomplished in the future. Research can identify more promising targets, find points of higher leverage, improve the effectiveness of technology, and reveal ways to lower the costs of production. If nothing else, interventions are likely to be much more effective at helping wild animals if they are designed specifically for that purpose, as opposed to incidentally benefiting animals insofar as it advances human health and economic priorities.
This is why we think that supporting the growing field of wild animal welfare science is a critical step to unlocking more ways to help wild animals. Actually doing the necessary research — and investing in the people and institutions who can sustain knowledge production — will not be as immediately rewarding as dumping vaccine pellets out of helicopters. But we think it will pay off in the long run, given how effective existing programs might be and how much room they have to improve.
