Ensuring positive outcomes when managing wildlife for welfare

March 13, 2026

Wildlife management aimed at maximizing the welfare of individual animals is a novel idea.

Unlike wildlife management aimed only at biodiversity conservation, management for wild animal welfare explores how to improve the lives of all sentient animals in an ecosystem, regardless of their species.

We don’t have much historical data on how to do this, so rather than building on established knowledge, Wild Animal Initiative is working to develop baseline knowledge about what wild animals’ lives are like and how we can responsibly improve them. 

The complexity of ecosystems is such that an intervention may have indirect or unanticipated network effects. The goal of wildlife management for welfare is therefore not only to improve the lives of particular animals in an ecosystem, but to gather data on how that intervention affects all of the other animals in that system. This information can help us determine whether an intervention leads to positive outcomes for the majority of animals — and is therefore worth implementing.

Ensuring that wild animal welfare interventions are net positive will require careful monitoring. We have so far identified three ways to approach this:

Single-species interventions can be implemented carefully on a small scale first.

If we’re aiming to improve the welfare of one focal species by looking for ways to alleviate their suffering from one specific cause, we can choose an intervention that is expected to have minimal effects on other species. This could be something like replacing lethal management of “pest” species with contraceptives that are equally (or more) effective at maintaining the desired population size. When the intervention is implemented, it should still be closely monitored to ensure the effects on the focal species and the downstream effects on other species are as expected. It can be tested on a small scale first, and then scaled up little by little as we become more and more confident in its effectiveness.

Habitat-wide interventions can be selected based on expected net welfare for all individuals involved.

Environmental managers often have to make decisions about what kind of habitat to establish in an area. If land is going to be restored to a previous state, what baseline should be used? Should it be encouraged to develop into a novel ecosystem? Or will the land be used for agriculture or development? If we know animals in one kind of habitat have better net welfare than the animals in another kind of habitat, that data could be used to inform these kinds of decisions about land use. This kind of assessment could be possible someday, but right now we don’t know enough about wild animal welfare to be able to assess the total welfare across all animals in a system. The fewer differences exist between the habitat types (considering species present, number of individuals per species, and average welfare per individual), the less challenging this would be to determine.

At this stage, not every intervention must be net positive in the short term.

Because the field of wild animal welfare science is at an early stage, we think it’s strategic and ethically viable to allow room for some “safe mistakes.” We might recommend an intervention with enough data behind it to suggest that it will be good for many animals, even if we’re not yet confident that it will be good for all animals on average. As long as the intervention is easily reversible and we’re closely monitoring its implementation, we can leverage our new knowledge to do even better for more animals in future iterations of similar interventions.