Mistakes
Wild Animal Initiative previously recorded mistakes in detail but discontinued this practice in 2022. This page serves as an archive of mistakes that had been recorded prior.
Always learning.
At Wild Animal Initiative, we’re committed to doing our best work. That requires learning from our mistakes, responding to new evidence, and shifting our strategy when necessary. To share what we’ve learned and to invite accountability, we’ll continue to document important updates to our thinking here.
For these purposes, we consider an action or an inaction to be a mistake if we would do it differently if given a second chance, regardless of whether or not we could have known better at the time.
We include a mistake here when it meets at least one of the following criteria for importance:
It violates the core values of our organization.
It teaches us something valuable and, if shared, might help others to avoid the same mistake in the future.
It could be relevant to a donor’s decision to support us or a program partner’s decision to work with us.
We exclude a mistake here when it meets at least one of the following criteria:
It only happened once and it had a small impact.
It purely relates to our operational productivity or efficiency.
We believe this scope allows us to shine a spotlight on the most important errors by reducing the number of less valuable blunders they might hide between.
2021
Spend more time documenting and updating our strategy
We made many changes to our programs, growth plans, and annual goals in 2021. Because we didn’t make enough time to record our thinking, our strategic planning documents were out of date for much of the second and third quarters of 2021. This made it harder to quickly and clearly convey our existing plans to potential donors and allied organizations. It also made it harder to assess and revise our plans when conditions changed.
Moving forward, we plan to revise our strategic planning documents on a regular schedule, to allow more time for setting and recording strategy, and to be more willing to deprioritize short-term projects to make these changes possible.
Clarify guidelines on intellectual property
Prior to 2021, we failed to establish clear guidelines around intellectual property rights in our staff contracts and our collaborations with external researchers. Fortunately, this has not resulted in any disputes over our work thus far; however, we recognize the risk for serious issues to arise in the absence of a clear approach.
By mid-2022, we plan to develop a written policy regarding intellectual property ownership for staff contracts as well as guidance for sharing project ideas with other scientists to prevent problems in the future.
2020
Properly implement our Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee
Wild Animal Initiative opposes all systems of oppression. We also believe that the wild animal welfare movement must be equitable to be effective. To ensure we continually put this belief into action, in December 2020 we established a committee tasked with promoting a work environment that cultivates diversity, equity, and inclusion; ensuring our programs and activities contribute to dismantling structural injustice; and fostering transparency and accountability in how we deal with these issues.
The committee had vocal support from the board and staff, and it made meaningful contributions to the development of policies and processes. But the committee was less effective than it could have been because it didn’t quickly establish processes to manage tasks, track progress, and report back.
We believe this is a result of mistakes by both the committee members and their managers. Specifically, committee members should have (1) agreed on clear roles, responsibilities, and deadlines for moving tasks forward (e.g. by using the MOCHA framework); (2) coordinated better in response to the departure of a staff member who served on the committee; (3) recognized these barriers to success; and (4) asked for assistance from staff not on the committee. The managers of the committee members should have prevented or mitigated these mistakes by (1) acknowledging that committee members would need extra support because their committee work was significantly different from their other responsibilities, (2) proactively checking in on progress and impediments to it, and (3) suggesting ways to deprioritize competing projects.
We identified these problems in mid 2021 and developed plans to address them. First, we finalized the committee’s standard operating procedures to clarify expectations around members’ work. Second, the committee began using a project management tool (Asana) to organize its work, including assigning owners and setting deadlines for tasks and projects. Third, committee members resolved to record more detailed meeting notes. Fourth, the committee and the executive director resolved to continue discussing what factors may be hindering progress and what other changes are needed to overcome these obstacles. Finally, we committed to publish quarterly reports on the committee’s recommendations, whether or not the organization adopted those recommendations, and why the organization did or did not.
Measure our impact
In 2020, we developed an Impact Measurement Plan to rigorously assess the effectiveness of our programs, and we publicly committed to implementing it. We decided not to implement this plan in 2020, and we do not plan to implement it in the remainder of 2021. Because the plan would have been time-consuming to implement, we were limited by staff time, and the results seemed unlikely to change our immediate next steps, measuring our impact this way did not seem worth the opportunity cost to other programs.
We plan to complete our first self-assessment of our impact by the end of 2022. We will do this in part by simplifying our measurement process, which will give us less information but make it more practical to implement. We have also increased our total staff capacity with three hires in 2021, including a Director of Scientific Affairs who will lead impact measurement.
2019
Coordinate research plans with related groups
In the past, we didn’t coordinate closely enough with other organizations. Because of that, in 2019 we unnecessarily duplicated research efforts on part of a project, creating an unexpected need to choose a new research direction, which delayed our project by 1-3 months.
We now meet at least quarterly with collaborators in the wild animal welfare community to ensure our general strategies and specific research projects are complementary and non-duplicative.
Spend more time prioritizing research
After founding Wild Animal Initiative in 2019, we primarily chose research projects based on our researchers’ interests and expertise, rather than the projects’ importance to the field. We think that was appropriate, because with so much unexplored territory, there was low-hanging fruit in many directions. It also helped us to quickly establish our research program’s credibility.
Having completed that initial exploration and proof-of-concept, in 2020 we developed a more systematic process to set research priorities. Because there remains high value to exploration and a (relatively) low amount of information to inform strict priorities, we limit the time we spend on this process to ensure our efforts strike the right balance of planning and action.
Make outreach more substantive
Wild Animal Initiative was formed in 2019 out of a merger between Utility Farm and Wild-Animal Suffering Research. In 2018, those organizations had tried cold-calling academics with relevant expertise to ask them about their general interest in wild animal welfare. They reported to us that this approach was largely unsuccessful.
Wild Animal Initiative has improved our outreach in three ways. First, we place a greater emphasis on hiring staff with academic credentials. Second, we center our outreach on substantive requests for engagement, such as feedback on a research topic or co-authorship on a paper. Third, we emphasize the intellectual merit of wild animal welfare research and its overlap with conservation biology and related disciplines.
Spend less time on research, more on outreach
At the beginning of 2019, we thought it would be more important for Wild Animal Initiative to conduct foundational wild animal welfare research, because we had a lower estimate of the likelihood of that work being done by other researchers. In 2019, we built relationships with more researchers in more fields. We learned that there is much more overlap than we expected between wild animal welfare research and ongoing work in related fields such as conservation biology, restoration ecology, and wildlife veterinary medicine.
In 2020, we began shifting our efforts to focus more on leveraging existing expertise and less on conducting research ourselves. Research is still a major part of our programming, but it is more tailored to exploring new areas, informing project prioritization, and facilitating new collaborations.
Focus on academic audiences
Upon its founding, Wild Animal Initiative inherited several outreach programs from its predecessors (Utility Farm and Wild-Animal Suffering Research). Of these, we discontinued three because we did not have much evidence for the impact of these programs and, because they were not targeted at academics, we didn’t have a reasonable theory of change for how they would efficiently contribute to the growth of a new field.
Nature Ethics was a website that featured articles from guest writers on topics related to wild animal welfare. We archived the website.
Wildness was a podcast that explored foundational concepts in wild animal welfare and interviewed relevant experts. After finishing the first season, we chose not to start a second. All episodes of Wildness are still available, and we think they are still a useful introduction to wild animal welfare.
The Compassionate Cat Grant was a field experiment to test the efficacy of informational pamphlets at convincing cat adopters to keep their cats indoors. We concluded the experiment after one field season and analyzed the results. We plan to share our findings in the form of an academic article and a summary on our website when organizational capacity allows (which we expect will be by early 2022), but we do not plan to conduct follow-up experiments or public messaging campaigns.