Wild Animal Initiative
Wild Animal Welfare Research and Field Building
Wild Animal Initiative seeks to advance wild animal welfare science through research, funding, and professional services, with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of wild animals responsibly and at scale.
What problem is Wild Animal Initiative working on?
Wild Animal Initiative is cultivating a scientific field dedicated to wild animal welfare. Animals suffer in the wild from both natural and human causes, and WAI estimates that wild vertebrates alone outnumber farmed vertebrates and humans by a factor of 100—meaning wild animals likely bear an enormous portion of global suffering.
Yet improving wild animal welfare on a large scale requires careful, evidence-based approaches. What helps some animals can harm others, creating unintended consequences when interventions aren't properly researched. Improving welfare is different from conserving species or habitats, so we need scientific research specific to the issue of welfare.
Wild systems are too complicated for any single researcher, lab, or organization to identify responsible solutions. To strengthen the field, WAI makes grants, conducts research, and provides career services to scientists, building a diverse network of researchers, funders, and institutions that can carry this work into the future.
What does Wild Animal Initiative do?
WAI’s mission is “to understand and improve the lives of wild animals.” To that end, WAI:
- Funds wild animal welfare research at universities and other institutions around the world to make the field more prolific and expand its scope via our Grants Program.
- Produces original research to identify high-potential areas for advancing the field and catalyze academic activity via our Research Program.
- Supports the professional needs of wild animal welfare researchers by connecting them with resources, networking opportunities, and training via our Outreach Program.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Wild Animal Initiative?1.
The impact-focused evaluator Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has recommended Wild Animal Initiative after conducting an evaluation of their work highlighting its cost-effectiveness. ACE writes: “Wild Animal Initiative’s work to increase knowledge and skills for animal advocacy is highly promising because it focuses on animal groups and interventions that we consider high priority. While we expect all of our evaluated charities to be excellent examples of effective advocacy, Wild Animal Initiative is exceptional even within that group. Giving to Wild Animal Initiative is an excellent opportunity to support initiatives that create the most positive change for animals.”
We looked into ACE Charity Evaluation program as part of our evaluator investigations, and decided to not currently rely on their charity recommendations. (We did choose to rely on their Movement Grants program, but this is separate from their recommended charities.) We still expect choosing ACE recommended programs to be significantly more impactful than choosing animal welfare programs without an impact-focused evaluation behind them, and we remain open to (some of) ACE's recommendations being among the most cost-effective donation opportunities in animal welfare.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.