A growing space for welfare at scientific conferences
Outreach Manager Janire Castellano Bueno presents at the 2024 Animal Behavior Society conference in Ontario, Canada.
June 5, 2025
Attending scientific conferences is one of Wild Animal Initiative’s most important activities: We view each conference as an opportunity to share knowledge with other researchers and explore their levels of interest in wild animal welfare science.
For the field of wild animal welfare science to be sustainable, it needs to provide intellectual value across a number of scientific communities. Because of this, much of our conference activity has involved connecting with researchers in closely related fields like ecology, animal behavior, conservation, and wildlife management. At major conferences in these fields, we exchange ideas about how these wildlife researchers can incorporate welfare into their work.
We’ve attended 44 scientific conferences since our founding in 2019. And in five years, we’ve seen big changes in how wild animal welfare is represented at conferences.
A look back at 2024
Animal behavior researchers embrace wild animal welfare
The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) held their first ever workshop on welfare at their conference in June 2024. Together with two large sessions that WAI ran, it was one of three welfare-focused events at the conference. At a WAI-led symposium attended by dozens of people, speakers including WAI grantees and other researchers focused explicitly on welfare and its connections to ecology and behavior, showcasing its scientific relevance.
“I don’t think talks like these would have existed at the ABS conference five years ago,” WAI Strategy Director Mal Graham says. “Welfare has only been mentioned about three times total in the past.”
Outreach Manager Janire Castellano Bueno believes that this is indicative of a trend within the animal behavior community: “I’m really surprised by how much wild animal welfare science has grown among the animal behavior community in the last few years. People are excited when they hear about welfare. There’s more understanding among behaviorists of how their skills can be used to study welfare. All behavior conferences now have some kind of space for it.”
One of the reasons we’re excited to see welfare-relevant research coming from fields like animal behavior and ecology is that significantly more funding is available for these disciplines than for animal welfare — so this is welfare research that might not otherwise have received the funding it needed to proceed.
“I’m really surprised by how much wild animal welfare science has grown among the animal behavior community in the last few years.”
— Janire Castellano Bueno, Outreach Manager
Janire attributes this increasing openness to welfare in large part to Wild Animal Initiative’s grantmaking. “There was no funding body for wild animal welfare before, so there was no space for people to focus on it even if they wanted to,” she says. “Multiple people I’ve connected with at conferences have told me that they wouldn’t have considered submitting a proposal related to wild animal welfare science when they were PhD students because they didn’t think anyone would fund it — it wasn’t viable to try to build a career in it.”
We hope to see other funders follow suit, but for now, our grants are opening up this career path for some researchers.
Another highlight from 2024 was the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s Congress in Melbourne, Australia. “We hadn’t personally engaged with that region much, so I was surprised when I brought up Wild Animal Initiative at networking meetings and most people already knew about us,” Janire says. “It means we’ve been successful in expanding the field.”
We’ve seen this same trend at the International Society for Applied Ethology’s conferences over recent years, where scientists who have focused on fitness and health in the past are increasingly mentioning welfare.
Our plans for 2025
Expanding our reach
There is much more work to do, though, and we’re excited to build on this growth of the field as we approach the 2025 conference season.
Our priority over the next five years is to build a presence for welfare in ecology research, where recognition is still lacking. Welfare has long been seen by some ecologists as a hindrance because welfare requirements can place limits on the kind of work they want to do. Helping them see how welfare can be integrated into their studies to better understand ecology could shift this perspective, encouraging them to see welfare as a tool — not a restriction. We hope to make similar progress in fields like conservation and wildlife management.
This year, we plan to attend the following conferences:
June
International Congress for Conservation Biology (Brisbane, Australia)
August
Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting (Baltimore, USA)
Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour International Ethological Congress (Kolkata, India)
September
Animal Welfare Research Network Annual Meeting (Bristol, UK)
October
The Wildlife Society Conference (Edmonton, Canada)
November
International Society for Wildlife Endocrinology conference (Saint Louis, USA)
December
British Ecological Society Annual Meeting (Edinburgh, UK)
If you’re a researcher who is planning to attend any of these conferences, keep an eye out for our talks, tables, and events. We’d love to connect and talk welfare.
