Grants
Our Research Grants and Fellowship Program are changing. Details will be announced mid-September. Sign up here to receive an email when the changes are announced.
Wild Animal Initiative funds academic research on high-priority questions in wild animal welfare.
The study of wild animal welfare is multidisciplinary, so we invite projects that relate to a range of research areas, including ecology and animal welfare science. But the projects we fund must explicitly seek to understand wild animal welfare. That means we do not fund conservation research, other areas of basic ecology, or other adjacent research areas. Before applying, we strongly recommend that you review our general selection criteria and familiarize yourself with the types of grants we offer.
Latest news about our grants
Explore our grants program
Seed Grants
Coming soon: Funding for projects that generate justified hypotheses through observational or pilot studies to later test through our more advanced grant types.
Validation Grants
Coming soon: Funding for projects that validate welfare indicators by studying how those indicators respond when animals are exposed to conditions expected to induce positive or negative valence.
Welfare Ecology Grants
Coming soon: Funding for projects that explore the relationship between welfare and other ecological parameters and processes based on a detailed plan for welfare assessment.
Grant review panels
Our scientific review panels consist of experts across relevant disciplines who evaluate projects proposed by our grant applicants and make recommendations for project improvement.
Projects we’ve funded
Meet our grantees and learn about their work.
FAQs
Answers to some common questions that we receive from prospective applicants.
Selection Criteria
We evaluate proposed projects in terms of their scope, feasibility, novelty, and specific relevance to wild animal welfare.
Click the "+" in each section below for details on our general selection criteria:
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We aim to understand and improve the welfare of as many individual animals as possible. Therefore, we prefer projects that focus on more abundant species, all else being equal.
Transferability is also a crucial consideration, but requires nuanced consideration of both the focal taxa and the welfare issues being addressed by the study.
Research on an endangered species of rodent or fish could have implications for related species that are highly abundant.
Similarly, a study on a ubiquitous welfare issue, like hunger, is going to have further-reaching implications than an otherwise equivalent study on the impact of local logging operations.
Scope
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Our consideration is not limited to direct, short-term impacts.
Wildlife management decisions influenced by the results of a project may affect a vast number of animals over time.
Long-term impact is necessarily speculative, but we would like to see some plausible theory of change explaining how the results of a project could eventually translate into improvements in wild animal welfare.
When considering the magnitude of welfare improvements, we consider both severity and duration. For example, a disease that is rare but has a high mortality rate may have a similar overall welfare impact to a disease that has sublethal welfare effects but is common.
Impact
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Research projects may promote engagement by validating a new method or introducing a new concept or study design that would make it easier for others to enter the field of wild animal welfare or open up new avenues of research.
Policy implications with the potential to persuade wildlife managers/policy-makers to consider wild animal welfare may also qualify as engagement.
Engagement
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We recognize that it is challenging to get funding for almost all areas of research, especially in ecology. However, as an organization with a very specific mission to promote research into wild animal welfare, we try to reserve our limited financial resources for projects that would be unlikely to obtain funding from mainstream scientific or conservation funders (e.g. NSF, NERC) due to their unique relevance to wild animal welfare.
This means that we are less likely to select otherwise sound and exciting projects that also address conservation concerns (e.g. population viability) or that conflate welfare with more widely studied concepts, such as evolutionary fitness.
Neglectedness
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We evaluate whether the proposed methods are sufficient to answer the research questions being posed. This includes not only the study design, but also the quality of indicators being used to infer animals’ welfare.
We also consider applicants’ prior experience of applying similar methods.
Finally, we consider whether underlying assumptions of the proposed study, such as independence of certain variables, or expected effect sizes, seem plausible or have already been tested (e.g. through a pilot or previous studies).
Feasibility
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Many of the causes of wild animal suffering are currently beyond human control, but we can avoid causing unnecessary harm through research methods. This is important not only in terms of ethics, but also for scientific data quality, as animals who have been acutely stressed by invasive sampling procedures may behave differently or exhibit altered physiology.
Projects that propose using invasive methods must explain why those methods are required and non-invasive alternatives are insufficient.
To avoid perpetuating human inequality within ecological research, we also expect applicants proposing to conduct research in countries which they are not normally resident in to include high-level collaborators with roots in those countries.
See WAI's animal methods guidelines for more information about what is permissible, along with advice on making your project more animal-friendly.
Research ethics
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Limiting activities in your project that do not contribute to understanding welfare or obtaining co-funding for them can improve your likelihood of receiving funding from WAI.
If some aspects of your project are of significantly greater interest to WAI than others, we may be able to offer partial funding for those aspects. You may identify in your proposal which activities are more or less essential.
Cost-effectiveness
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Welfare indicator validation: Testing whether proposed welfare indicators and metrics respond in the biologically expected direction under conditions that are established to be positive or negative for welfare.
Interspecific interactions: Trade-offs and synergies in the welfare of members of different wild animal species, including via predation, competition, or facilitation.
Population dynamics: Welfare implications of population size relative to limiting factors at all scales; from resource limitation, to sibling competition, to cooperative defense, to disease transmission.
Cause-specific mortality: How wild animals die, and what factors may directly and indirectly lead to their deaths.
Landscape ecology: Variation in wild animal welfare across land cover types and in relation to geographical features, such as habitat edges.
Cascade effects: Conceptual analysis of community dynamics to understand indirect effects of species and habitat parameters on others’ welfare.
Welfare interventions: Intervening in ecological systems to improve wild animal welfare, including characterizing direct impacts and potential indirect impacts on non-target species. Promising examples include wildlife contraception and vaccination.
Juvenile welfare: Investigating how welfare varies and across life stages in wild animals, with a particular focus on early life stages, as these tend to be the most abundant.
Invertebrate welfare: Assessing welfare in wild invertebrates.
Fish welfare: Assessing welfare in wild fish.
Relevance to research priorities
Past calls for proposals
All grant types (2025)
All grant types (2024)
Challenge grants (2023)
Seed grants (2023)
Large grants (2022)
Small grants (2022)
Juvenile welfare (2021)