At Wild Animal Initiative, we believe it’s critical for us to identify systemic racism in our field, actively seek ways to eliminate oppression, and employ methods that prioritize justice and equity.

We’re supporting a crowdfunded study about environmental factors affecting frigatebird chicks’ vulnerability to a deadly viral disease. Here’s why we think this project is promising for the development of an academic field of wild animal welfare.

Jane shares what she learned as a Researcher at Wild Animal Initiative, the impact she had on our organization, and the next steps in her career.

Uncertainty about fundamental ethics is a significant roadblock to large-scale intervention for wild animal welfare. There is also plenty of uncertainty on more empirical questions. Fortunately, these questions seem much more tractable, and answers to some may reveal actions we can take that are robustly good under a range of ethics.

This opinion piece explores an important area of uncertainty in wild-animal welfare research: determining which beings deserve moral consideration, using insects as a case study.

Uncertainty is not an intractable problem nor should uncertainty necessarily stop us from studying interventions to improve wild animal welfare. If interventions are designed as experiments in nature, then even failed interventions will generate knowledge to help animals in the future.

Although critiques based on non-target uncertainty do not exclusively apply to wild animal welfare, we should still strive to improve our ability to predict non-target consequences of our interventions in all cause areas, and work to resolve some types of uncertainty that are particularly relevant to wild animal welfare.