April 24, 2020

With the cancellation of this Spring’s Effective Altruism Global conference, we wanted to find another way to engage with the community of researchers and advocates interested in understanding and improving the lives of wild animals. Wild Animal Initiative, Animal Ethics and Rethink Priorities co-hosted a virtual wild animal welfare meetup on April 12, 2020. Twenty-six people affiliated with seven organizations attended the meetup, representing a broad variety of interests and expertise including policy, philosophy, and farmed and wild animal welfare research and advocacy.

The feedback we received from attendees was overwhelmingly positive. Many were motivated to attend in order to improve coordination between organizations working on wild animal welfare, and to learn about new developments in the space. We had some great conversations in the meetup’s breakout sessions, covering such diverse topics as media engagement, animal advocacy, academic outreach, policy, and research priorities in welfare biology. By popular request, we’ll be incorporating more breakout discussions into future events of this type.

Above all, the meetup was a great opportunity to foster connection in the multinational wild animal welfare research and advocacy community, and we hope to host many more. As one attendee said, “Creating a sense of community matters here, and it's difficult to do when people are spread across the globe.” Building strong connections is crucial to the growth of such a young cause area as wild animal welfare. We are excited to see how this community will expand and change in the coming years.