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For the new year, invest in a better future for wild animals.
Wild animal suffering is a huge, complex problem.
The only way we’re going to start solving it is by building our work on a solid strategy, so our goal has always been to develop a scientific field dedicated to studying wild animal welfare. As we’ve honed our strategy over the years, we’ve identified three key things that enable a field to thrive: knowledge, resources, and community.
By knowledge, we mean the field must produce a body of research, including articles published in peer-reviewed research journals, that can be used to inform wild animal welfare management and practice. A scientific field that doesn’t produce a sufficient volume of reliable information will not be able to support responsible intervention to help wild animals.
The field also needs sufficient resources to make all that research possible. Funding is a huge part of that, but so are institutions — scientists need places to work, journals to publish in, and conferences where they can exchange ideas.
But science can’t advance in a vacuum, so the community aspect of the field is also critical: a group of people who have a sense of identity in wild animal welfare science, who value interacting with others who feel the same, and who want to invest in the next generation of researchers.
We’re seeing promising signs that our work on wild animal welfare is being embraced and carried forward by an increasing number of scientists in a variety of fields. But to continue this growth trajectory, we need your support. With more funding, we can take advantage of the momentum we’ve built in a variety of domains, sparking new research and idea-sharing in the budding community. Without it, we risk letting this progress fizzle out.
Would you partner with us and help us achieve even more in 2025 and beyond?
Wild Animal Initiative is one of the most impactful giving opportunities assessed by Animal Charity Evaluators.