Core Concepts: Maximizing welfare
May 29, 2025
To maximize overall welfare and minimize overall suffering among wild animals, Wild Animal Initiative prioritizes research on common animals that are often neglected by other fields. An indicator, event, or intervention that can help us understand and improve the lives of animals who number in the millions or billions will likely do much more good than one that can be applied only to a rare species or a very small population.
This focus on abundant animals is one of the key distinctions between wild animal welfare science and related fields that produce research on things like preserving biodiversity or managing wild animal populations.
WAI’s interest in maximizing welfare is reflected in the research that we conduct and in the projects we fund. One of our criteria when selecting projects to fund is “scope”: the approximate number of animals who stand to benefit from the results of a project. In some cases, research on rare or endangered species may be useful from a welfare perspective — for instance, if it validates an indicator that can be used in other species, too, or if it examines the endangered species as an umbrella species or as a driver of ecosystem dynamics. As a general principle, though, a project that is exclusively beneficial to a rare species is less likely to meet our “scope” criterion. For this reason, 80% of our grantees’ focal species are common, abundant ones.
It’s also important to note that maximizing welfare and maximizing or stabilizing population size are different aims, and are not always achieved by the same means. As one illustration of this principle, if millions of juveniles belonging to a certain species die in a fierce competition for survival each breeding season, but the overall population remains stable, this might be considered a good outcome from the perspective of biodiversity conservation, but a poor one from a wild animal welfare perspective.
Research priorities in welfare maximization
Understanding and improving the lives of common species
Many foundational questions need to be answered before we can begin to help wild animals at scale. What is the natural history of welfare for a given species? What are the most important factors that influence individual wild animal welfare? How do we measure the welfare of free-ranging wild animals? Which interventions have the potential to improve the lives of individuals within a species with minimal negative side-effects? The quickest way to answer these questions for a very large number of animals is to study them with reference to common species with many individuals.
Understanding and improving the lives of juvenile animals
Because the majority of wild animals die before reaching adulthood, most of those alive at any given time are juveniles. This means that research on juveniles has the potential to impact a very large number of individuals, and finding ways to improve their welfare is therefore a high priority.
Understanding network effects and net welfare
Maximizing welfare isn't as simple as finding a way to improve quality of life for individuals belonging to a single, abundant species. Helping some animals can hurt others, in part because of knock-on effects that an intervention might have for other animals in an ecosystem. An intervention that benefits a common species may have a positive effect on the net welfare of an entire population or ecosystem — but it might not, depending on how many other species and individuals it impacts, and how strong those impacts are. For example, an EU program to vaccinate red foxes against rabies led to a substantial increase in their numbers, which may have implications for the welfare of other animals that compete with red foxes. Network effects are complicated and poorly understood at this stage, so we'd like to see many more researchers working on these questions.
