October 20, 2025

A pregnant white-footed mouse scurries through the pine flatwoods of southern Georgia. After narrowly evading an owl by night, then a hawk by day, she finds a place to give birth: an empty tin box in an old cabin. For weeks while her vulnerable pups grow, she is exhausted. Caring for them is a 24/7 job, while she still has to forage so she doesn’t starve, and stay on alert for threats. During a Southern summer thunderstorm, the cabin roof leaks and the tin box starts to flood, so she must carry her babies to safety, but in the turmoil she is forced to leave one of them behind. Days later, another pup ventures out of the nest and is lured into a snap trap. Another goes missing. The mother mouse’s entire litter has died before weaning.

If this sounds like the plotline of a bad dream, that’s intentional. The mother mouse is one of the main subjects in Nightmares of Nature, a Netflix series released this month. With creepy music, jump scares, and an ominous script narrated by Maya Hawke, the series is a clear pick for “spooky season.” But the value it carries goes much deeper than pure entertainment: A lesson that life in the wild is not the idyllic scene we see in most media, but rather, it can be terrifying, and full of suffering.

Like the mouse pups in the series, the vast majority of wild animals die before they reach adulthood. And even among those who have made it to maturity, disease, injury, and starvation are overwhelmingly common. Once we become aware of wild animal suffering and we want to solve it, where do we start?

We need a scientific field dedicated to producing knowledge about life in the wild.

To find the most effective ways to improve the lives of wild animals on a large scale, we need a lot more data about how to measure their welfare, what kinds of things they suffer from, which sources of suffering are the worst for them, how to intervene without causing unintended knock-on effects on non-target species. But wild animal welfare science is understudied, novel, and uniquely challenging. So our mission is to accelerate the growth of this field by producing new research insights, funding researchers who want to study these topics, and engaging the academic community with professional services.

Our vision is a world where people want to help individual wild animals, and they’re equipped with the knowledge they need.

We can’t get there alone. Progress will require contributions from scientists across a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. Researchers from animal welfare science, ecology, animal behavior, cognitive science, physiology, and related areas all have valuable skills to offer this burgeoning field.

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