Wild Animal Initiative explores the most pressing questions in wild animal welfare science.
The scientists on our staff and in our field are welfare biologists.
They seek to understand animals’ subjective experiences — their quality of life, from their point of view. This is related to affective states, which are long-lasting mood states (such as anxiety or depression) that result from an accumulation of experiences. By exploring questions about animals’ subjective experiences and finding out what life is like in the wild through scientific study, we hope the data produced by welfare biologists will ultimately inform policy and wildlife management in a way that improves the lives of as many animals as possible.
In our field, we explore questions like:
What is life like in the wild?
How can we measure welfare?
What interventions can do the most good for the largest number of individuals?
For a more detailed view of the questions we explore, view our Research Priorities.
House sparrow welfare research
In our current fieldwork, we're recording and analyzing house sparrow vocalizations to find out how water availability and welfare could be linked. Our research team will record audio and video at a variety of sites where house sparrows live, analyze the birds’ behavior and vocalizations captured in the footage, and then look for relationships between water availability and welfare-indicative behaviors. For a more detailed look at this project, visit our blog.
Make the world a better place for wild animals
The house sparrow project has the potential to produce groundbreaking data that will be useful to scientists in numerous fields, including urban ecology, animal behavior, and climate science. And ultimately, we hope research like this will influence urban development policies so that wild animal welfare is taken into consideration.
We envision a future in which even house sparrows — a species that is typically ignored at best, and despised at worst — will be understood and valued as individuals. Each research project like this one will take us one step closer, but there’s so much more work to be done.
When you donate to Wild Animal Initiative, you make it possible for us to continue our work building an academic field dedicated to critical research in wild animal welfare.
