Validation Grants

Applications for grants are now open through October 31.

Information on grant eligibility, guidelines, and the application process can be found below. Click here to read the announcement.

As a subjective state, welfare is not directly measurable and is therefore inferred through indirect indicators. These indicators must be validated to ensure that they can be used to reliably assess welfare. Validated indicators for specific species and systems provide the foundation upon which all further wild animal welfare research depends.

Wild Animal Initiative’s Validation Grants support research projects that measure proposed welfare indicators under conditions with predictably positive or negative impacts on the welfare of the animals in question, to see whether the indicators consistently reflect those presumed welfare states. See Browning 2023 ‘Validating Indicators of Subjective Animal Welfare’, Philosophy of Science, 90(5), pp. 1255–1264. doi:10.1017/psa.2023.10.

Validated welfare indicators are arguably the most important bottleneck in wild animal welfare science, and are a prerequisite for most other WAI grants (e.g., Welfare Ecology Grants). We are also interested in negative results, for example where indicators respond inconsistently to different welfare treatments.

Grant size

Up to $200,000 USD total

Duration

Up to 3 years

Selection criteria for Validation Grants

  • Projects must test the validity of indicators to assess welfare of wild animals (i.e., their affective states).  

  • Projects must not have objectives that are not required for welfare indicator validation. 

  • Studies involving animals in captivity are acceptable for Validation Grants, as long as the nature of the welfare indicators and treatment conditions for the validation experiment would make the results likely transferable to wild individuals of the same or closely related species.

  • We evaluate proposed projects in terms of our general selection criteria (scope, impact, engagement, feasibility, research ethics, focus on wild animal welfare, and cost-effectiveness). In addition, we evaluate validation grant proposals based on their ability to evaluate indicators and their connection to welfare, the conditions used for validation, and the pathway they enable to future projects and ultimate interventions.  

  • If successful at the EOI stage and invited to submit a full proposal, an Indicator Validation plan will also need to be submitted. It may be useful to have this in mind when completing the EOI form.

Application process

CFP guidance is provided in the relevant announcement document, but in summary: 

  • Applicants submit an EOI form with details on the project. 

  • Shortlisted applicants are invited to submit a full proposal, indicator validation plan and supporting documents (animal methods form and collaborator CVs).

  • Further shortlisted applicants may be required to submit changes based on reviewer feedback before final decisions are communicated. 

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