Why should you care about insect welfare? Hollis Howe summarizes the literature on invertebrate sentience, estimates the number of insects affected by agricultural insecticide use, and describes the effects of common insecticidal compounds and other pest control methods.

Stanford economics PhD student Zach Freitas-Groff explains his and Dr. Yew-Kwang Ng’s new interpretation of Ng’s model. Wild Animal Initiative Executive Director Mal Graham joins him to further explore implications for wild animal welfare.

Wild Animal Initiative Executive Director Mal Graham covers the basics of fitness and evolution, and explains how they may relate to wild animal welfare.

Welfare expectancy can serve as a framework for weighing up the different levels of well-being animals might experience over the course of their lives, helping to model the welfare consequences of interventions and natural pressures, such as predation, that may disproportionately affect animals of particular ages.

This summer, Wild Animal Initiative hosted two summer interns, Anthony DiGiovanni and Dylan Quinn. Both were great additions to the Wild Animal Initiative team and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.

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.

We estimate that our staff’s work is around one-half the hours dedicated to these issues globally. This summer, we are raising $50,000 to continue our work. Please continue to follow our progress, and donate today to help us reach this goal.