A landscape analysis of wild animal welfare

Executive Summary

Introductions to wild animal welfare as a moral concern abound, but there is no centralized overview of efforts to help wild animals. Using interviews and publicly available material, we describe the theories of change of five organizations working on wild animal welfare: Wild Animal Initiative, Welfare Footprint, Animal Ethics, Animal Charity Evaluators, and New York University's (NYU) Wild Animal Welfare program.

Our synthesis reveals several commonalities:

• Academic outreach is the main tactic.
• Organizations have a cautious attitude towards controversial efforts to ameliorate non-anthropogenic harms.
• Organizations have focused mostly on helping mammals and birds so far.
• All organizations have room for more funding.

To contextualize these trends, we assume that there are three preconditions to improving the aggregate welfare of wild animals at scale:

1. Valid measurement: Knowledge of (a) how to measure the welfare of wild animals and (b) the causal relationships among the factors that influence it.
2. Technical Ability: Technology and skill to implement interventions to help wild animals at scale, while minimizing unintended negative consequences.
3. Stakeholder Buy-In: Consent from stakeholders with veto power, and collaboration from stakeholders who can implement scalable interventions.

When comparing the needs of the movement with organizations' activities, we see the following gaps:

• Academic outreach efforts do not yet focus on the most abundant taxa, or make salient the outsized role they play in determining the aggregate welfare of an ecosystem.
• There is little targeted outreach to groups other than academics.
• There is little work advancing Technical Ability.
• There are few investments in implementing interventions in the near-term.

Introduction

Wild animal welfare is a movement dedicated to promoting the interest of wild animals as ends in themselves. There is no shortage of primers explaining why humans should be alarmed by the threats facing wild animals¹. To our knowledge, though, there is no single place to learn about what organizations are actually doing to improve wild animal welfare at scale. Here, we profile five organizations that dedicate substantial resources to wild animal welfare: Wild Animal Initiative, Welfare Footprint, Animal Ethics, Animal Charity Evaluators, and the New York University Wild Animal Welfare program.

Among nonprofits that intend to benefit wild animals, these organizations are unique in at least two ways. First, they regard non-anthropogenic harms to wild animals as equally morally relevant to anthropogenic harms. Accordingly, they do not take it for granted that protecting their habitats from human encroachment is sufficient or even always helpful for safeguarding wild animal welfare. In principle, they are open to interventions to systematically mitigate non-anthropogenic harms. Second, they work on wild animal welfare primarily because they believe that it is a neglected issue of large scale (Wiblin, 2019), not due to partiality towards wild animals per se.² There are a large number of organizations that aim to help wild animals (e.g., the Wild Animal Welfare Committee, World Animal Protection), albeit from a different philosophical perspective.

Theories of Change

For each organization we profile, we:

1. attempt to reconstruct their theory of change– that is, their empirical assumptions about why their activities will enable them to achieve their goals.
2. report the benchmarks that would indicate that they are achieving their theory of change, and
3. describe the bottlenecks they face to enacting their theory of change.

There was sufficient information on organization websites to write a first draft of their theories of change. In some cases, though, we had to make inferences that went beyond publicly available materials to spell out the entire chain of reasoning. We were also unable to determine what benchmarks they use internally, and what bottlenecks they face. Thus, we engaged with leaders³ from each organization twice. In April, 2023, we conducted semi-structured interviews (see Appendix 1). In February 2024, we asked the interviewees to address any inaccuracies in our write-ups.

Activities

We classify organizations' programs using the following taxonomy of activities⁴:

• Intervention implementation: Actions that attempt to directly improve the lives of wild animals at scale. Interventions that are already available may include:
  • Campaigning to encourage pest control companies to adopt more humane methods.
  • Vaccinating wild animals against diseases.
• Intervention development: Development of tools and protocols for helping wild animals at scale. Potential examples include:
  • Developing birth control that is highly palatable to target species and ineffective on non-target species.
  • Creating an insecticide that inflicts less severe pain or kills more quickly.
• Outreach: Any activity that intends to develop a community that will execute activities which plausibly improve wild animal welfare. Examples include:
  • Academic Outreach: Efforts to get researchers to develop the knowledge base required to improve wild animal welfare at a scale that is not currently possible.
  • Youth Outreach: Efforts to shape the values of the next generation to ensure that concern for wild animal welfare grows over time.
  • Movement Outreach: Efforts to influence members of allied movements (conservationist, environmentalist, animal advocacy).
• Lobbying: Persuading government bodies to consider wild animal welfare in their decision-making. Examples include:
  • Promoting legislation that would give wild animals legal status.
  • File lawsuits against seismic surveys that cause harmful noise to marine animals.
• Organization evaluation: Efforts to inform potential funders and other stakeholders how helpful an organization's activities are to advancing wild animal welfare.
• Scientific Research: Any original empirical research to better understand the welfare of wild animals or how to improve it. Potential examples include:
  • Studying how much fear members of a prey species experience due to the presence of nearby predators.
  • Assessing how the population size of a species is likely to change in response to a change in the population size of another species.
• Desk Research: Any research that is not based on original empirical investigations, but is instead based on modeling, philosophy, summarizing existing work, etc. Examples include:
  • Cost-effectiveness analysis of a proposed intervention to improve wild animal welfare.
  • Resolving issues in decision theory that bear on how much risk stakeholders should tolerate when implementing interventions to help wild animals.
• Grantmaking: Any activity that provides the resources for other organizations to carry out activities that plausibly improve wild animal welfare. Examples include:
  • Disbursing funds to carry out scientific studies of wild animal welfare.
  • Financial support for groups who are lobbying on behalf of wild animals.

Preconditions

To contextualize organizations' theories of change, we postulate that there are at least three preconditions for helping wild animals at scale⁵:

1. Valid measurement: Knowledge of (a) how to measure the welfare of wild animals and (b) the causal relationships among the factors that influence it. Identifying the largest threats to wild animals depends on the ability to measure their welfare. Similarly, without the ability to reliably predict how an intervention would change the habitats wild animals live in, there is little reason to expect that it will do more good than harm.
2. Technical Ability: Technology and skill to implement interventions to help wild animals at scale, while minimizing unintended negative consequences. Even if the knowledge of which interventions would help wild animals was available, the means to implement those interventions is in most cases not yet available.
3. Stakeholder Buy-In: Consent from stakeholders with veto power, and collaboration from stakeholders who can implement scalable interventions. Large-scale interventions cannot occur without permission from governments, who are constrained by existing law and public opinion. Cooperation from stakeholders who can implement large-scale interventions will also be necessary. Many intervention candidates may be inconsistent with most people's current values and incentives because they would change natural habitats and their inhabitants, and potentially pose risks to humans.

Figure 1 depicts the fact that activities enhance the movement's capability to implement large-scale interventions via putting in place the necessary preconditions.

Figure 1. Relationships among activities and preconditions for helping wild animals at scale.⁶

After classifying which preconditions each organization is advancing, we zoom out to take note of the commonalities among different organizations' approaches. This exercise reveals potential opportunities to help wild animals that go beyond organizations' current plans.

Wild Animal Initiative

Wild Animal Initiative was founded in 2019 through a merger between Utility Farm and Wild Animal Suffering Research. Their mission is to "support a scientific community dedicated to studying wild animal welfare" because the movement "can’t make meaningful progress for wild animals until we know more about their lives and how to measure their well-being" (2022 Annual Report, p. 7). It spent roughly $1,800,000 USD in 2022, and around $2,300,000 USD in 2023.

Theory of Change

On Wild Animal Initiative's theory of change (see Figure 2 from their 2022 strategic plan), their programs help wild animals by building a scientific field of wild animal welfare science. The field can create the scientific knowledge necessary to advance Valid Measurement and Technical Ability to the extent required for helping wild animals at scale. By building a community around a shared mission, Wild Animal Initiative also creates Stakeholder Buy-In within academia, an institution that will play an integral role in persuading other stakeholders. For example, policymakers have the power to remove legal barriers to interventions and subsidize their implementation. One step they will take when deciding whether to exercise this power is consulting the scientific literature or scientific experts to see whether interventions actually do more good than harm.

Figure 2. Wild Animal Initiative's theory of change diagram

Several conditions must hold for a field to mature and maintain itself. First, it needs a stable source of funding. Not only do scientists need a steady stream of support to conduct their studies, but the ability to obtain grant funding also increases their hireability. Second, it needs a community committed to ensuring its own long-term viability. Peers reinforce each other's interests and ensure that the field's goals do not drift over time. Third, to attract new members and fend off efforts from critics to marginalize it, the field needs recognition from other key stakeholders– e.g., academics in neighboring fields, influential institutions like the U.S. National Science Foundation – of its legitimacy and utility. The primary way the field will gain recognition is probably through demonstrating scientific excellence via conventional means, like publishing in high-impact peer-reviewed journals. Last, a new field needs institutions through which to coordinate activities and maintain the above-mentioned conditions.

Wild Animal Initiative uses Grantmaking to provide funding⁷. In brief, their Grants program supports postdoctoral fellowships and studies related to their research priorities:

1. Basic science about how wild animal welfare varies as a function of a wide variety of variables studied by life scientists.
   1. E.g., studying the effect of population density on welfare in otters and minks
2. Methodological advancements in measuring wild animal welfare
   1. E..g., validation of a non-invasive measure of steroid hormone levels
3. Assessments of interventions to help wild animals.
   1. E.g., testing the effect of contraception on heat stress in pigeons

A useful side effect of Grantmaking is that making an effort to qualify for the grants requires adopting the perspective that Wild Animal Initiative wants biologists and ecologists to consider. This may itself increase Stakeholder Buy-In. Grantmaking also improves recognition. By selectively supporting only the most rigorous applications it receives, it preempts allegations that the field is unserious, or that its objectivity is compromised by activism. And by prioritizing research on natural harms over research on anthropogenic harms, they increase the recognition of how non-anthropogenic factors affect welfare.

Wild Animal Initiative builds community and institutions via Academic Outreach. Their Services program includes career advising to scientists interested in studying wild animal welfare, a listserv to facilitate networking, workshops and talks at academic conferences, and more. Behind the scenes, they have been involved in efforts to start hubs for wild animal welfare science within universities, including the NYU program.

Finally, Wild Animal Initiative's Research program conducts Scientific Research and Desk Research; their reports and academic papers are available on their website's library. These outputs not only directly improve Valid Measurement, but also may increase recognition of the field. The organization's research staff have the formal credentials to publish in high-quality journals, helping steer the development of the field in a value-aligned direction.

Benchmarks

• Growth in field membership. Wild Animal Initiative is interested in not only the number of scientists that have conducted relevant studies, but also in adequate representation at both junior and senior career stages. The growth in members should also dovetail with increased identification as a wild animal welfare scientist, which Wild Animal Initiative may ask about in future surveys.
• Growth in academic programs, grant proposals, and conferences focused on wild animal welfare. Their operationalization of success in community-building is that, if surveyed, ~90% of scientists who identify as wild animal welfare scientists would report satisfaction with the opportunities they have to interact with colleagues. Creating these opportunities requires both awareness of the field among biologists and infrastructure for productive interactions. They measure the former using easily accessible metrics such as the number of applicants to their requests for proposals. They are hoping to develop other metrics that could be tracked over time, such as the percentage of biologists who can accurately define wild animal welfare science in surveys. They see the number of academic programs and conferences focused on wild animal welfare as the strongest barometers of adequate infrastructure. Although a truly robust infrastructure will take longer to build, individual symposiums on wild animal welfare at conferences would indicate progress.
• Increased number of publications. Wild Animal Initiative most strongly values publications that include actual measurements of welfare in a wild population. They also hope to see a greater number of papers that were motivated by a desire to improve or better understand the welfare of wild animals, or at least call for more research on the topic.
• Increased availability of jobs related to wild animal welfare science. Wild Animal Initiative aims to eventually track the percentage of wild animal welfare scientists who are able to find relevant jobs. They define success as having a similar chance of getting an academic job as an evolutionary biologist.

Bottlenecks

• Insufficient funding. Wild Animal Initiative believes they could fund more studies than they are able to now; even if some of these additional studies would be somewhat less relevant to their core mission, the financial support would nevertheless aid community-building. With more funding, they could also hire more development staff that would eventually increase their capacity and reduce their reliance on existing funders. With millions more in funding, they could work with academic institutions to seed more academic programs.
• Low Awareness of Wild Animal Welfare. Few scientists understand what makes wild animal welfare science distinct from related fields like compassionate conservation. The relevance of some grant proposals they receive has suffered as a result. The greater amount of energy Wild Animal Initiative needs to spend on educating scientists about the core concepts, the fewer resources they have available for supporting actual research.
• Limitations of Available Methods. Scientific knowledge of how to study wild animal welfare is scarce, which limits the relevance of the projects that are feasible to conduct right now. As one example, Wild Animal Initiative mentioned that modeling the welfare of all species in an ecosystem is beyond what is currently tractable for ecologists.

Welfare Footprint

Welfare Footprint was founded in 2017 by Wladimir Alonso and Cynthia Schuck-Paim, who have a background in global health research. The impetus for Welfare Footprint was to generate figures that encapsulate the amount of animal suffering in a product, analogous to a carbon footprint. To do so, the organization develops and applies methods for measuring welfare losses in nonhuman animals. It has an annual budget of roughly $400,000 USD.

Theory of Change

Welfare Footprint's theory of change (see Figure 2) primarily improves Valid Measurement– in particular, the understanding of how to validly compare the magnitude of different threats. Widespread knowledge of how to compare welfare losses will increase awareness of the largest sources of pain nonhuman animals endure. It can also increase the salience of knowledge gaps that undermine precise estimates, enabling more efficient allocations of funding for future studies. Awareness may also increase Stakeholder Buy-in, insofar as indifference to animal suffering is due to ignorance about its magnitude. Increased awareness is also promoted through the use of a relatable metric of suffering that is comparable across species (time in pain - physical or psychological - of varying intensities). For example, Welfare Footprint estimated the welfare gains associated with adopting the Better Chicken Commitment for broiler chickens. Depending on to whom the findings are disseminated, they could inform decision-making in several ways. Animal advocates can determine which reforms actually result in the largest improvements in welfare, and prioritize those over other reforms that are less impactful. Consumers can also use a relatable metric of suffering that is comparable across species to determine for themselves how much suffering they believe is acceptable to impose on farmed animals. Policymakers could use the results to evaluate claims by industry lobbyists that conventional standards are ultimately best for farmed animals.

Welfare Footprint has conducted less work on wild animals so far⁸, but told us that their theory of change applies to wild animals in much the same way it applies to farmed animals. For example, an estimation of the amount of just how much pain that a wild species endures due to disease may increase openness to interventions that address it. With an estimate of how much such interventions would cost, one could determine how cost-effective it is to eliminate the disease, which would be relevant to policymakers.

To improve comparisons of "pain" (i.e., their umbrella term for all negatively valenced experience, whether physical or psychological), Welfare Footprint uses Desk Research. In particular, they invented the Cumulative Pain framework, a four-level taxonomy for estimating the severity of pain: annoying, hurtful, disabling, and excruciating. Pains cannot be directly observed, but the framework assumes, similar to other welfare assessment methods, a relationship between felt severity of pain and its effects on behavior and neurophysiology. Researchers can draw on scientific studies to create "pain-tracks," (Alonso & Schuck-Paim, 2021), which show how long an individual experiencing a certain welfare threat would typically spend in each of the four types of pain.

Figure 3. Welfare Footprint's theory of change diagram

Of course, Welfare Footprint's theory of change will only succeed if the framework is applied, and the results are disseminated to and accepted by stakeholders who have the ability to implement interventions on behalf of animals. Their Outreach efforts include workshops, virtual office hours (one-on-one and public sessions), lectures at conferences, academic papers and Pain-Compare, a visualization tool analogous to the Global Burden of Disease tools used to compare the tolls of human diseases. So far these efforts have mostly targeted animal advocates, animal welfare scientists and veterinarians, though they have also started disseminating their method to the agricultural industry.

Benchmarks

• Increased awareness of Welfare Footprint's methodological tools. Awareness of the Cumulative Pain method so far is largely restricted to those working in the animal advocacy movement.
• Application of the Cumulative Pain framework. In particular, using the framework without Welfare Footprint's direct involvement is necessary for its impact to scale. The frequency of application of the Cumulative Pain approach to wild animals could serve as a barometer of awareness of wild animal suffering in academia, and eventually the public.

Bottlenecks

• Lack of institutional affiliation. Welfare Footprint envisions that affiliating with a university or research institute may accelerate outreach, just as having the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation housed within University of Washington helped popularize the use of disability-adjusted life years in estimating the burden of human diseases.
• Uncertainty about how to measure severity using a single metric. The Cumulative Pain framework measures severity on an ordinal scale, due to a lack of "understanding [regarding] the numerical relationship among the intensity categories in terms of the aversiveness they cause: how much worse is the hurtful experience compared to an annoying or disabling pain?; or how long should an individual endure an annoying pain to make it equivalent to a few minutes of excruciating pain?" (Alonso & Schuck-Paim, 2021; p. 4). Although disaggregated estimates can currently rank most of the welfare challenges analyzed in farmed animal scenarios, without a single cardinal measure of severity, it will be impossible to determine the rank-order of welfare threats when more complex trade-offs between intensity and duration are present, much less the magnitude of difference in their aversiveness.

New York University Wild Animal Welfare Program

Launched in late 2022, the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University (NYU) provides an academic home for the movement. According to its homepage, it "aims to advance understanding about what wild animals are like, how humans and wild animals interact, and how humans can improve our interactions with wild animals at scale." The program's leaders are Jeff Sebo and Becca Franks, and its annual budget is around $200,000 USD.

Theory of Change

Leadership told us that the program's mission is to help build a "rigorous, multidisciplinary scholarly field" investigating "what wild animals are like, how humans and wild animals interact, and how we can improve those interactions at scale." Housing a program at a university provides the infrastructure that Wild Animal Initiative's theory of change identifies as a necessity for wild animal welfare science to develop. Affiliates will conduct research, edit books, and coordinate op-eds. So far, the program has hosted workshops and talks on myriad topics within wild animal welfare (see their Events page). It will also appoint faculty from the Environmental Studies department, and participate in the administration of an Environmental Studies Ph.D. program, which will include content on wild animal welfare.

However, the theory of change for the two organizations are not identical, because their approach to Academic Outreach is different. Whereas Wild Animal Initiative focuses on supporting biologists and ecologists, The NYU Wild Animal Welfare facilitates "foundational research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences… [and] outreach to academics, advocates, policymakers, and the general public.” The NYU program also has a more "big-tent" philosophy, treating a range of moral worldviews as worth considering. The program mentions both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic threats to wild animals when introducing the topic, but discusses the former first:

Trillions of wild animals suffer each year due to farming, fishing, deforestation, development, and other human activities…And of course, many wild animals also suffer due to illness, injury, and other natural causes, even when their habitats are well-preserved. Learning more about these issues will guide us toward policies that can be good for humans and wild animals at the same time.

The NYU program's broader approach partly reflects the fact that the program is relatively public-facing, given its affiliation with a university with name recognition and prestige. The attention and scrutiny behooves the program to avoid introducing wild animal welfare in a way that would compromise Stakeholder Buy-in. For many casual observers, a focus on non-anthropogenic harms may seem out of touch with the concerns of the broader public. Even among potential allies— such as researchers in related fields, scientific funders, students, and environmental policymakers — there is a risk making potential zero-sum relationships between wild animal welfare and other concerns salient. Placing somewhat more emphasis on anthropogenic effects on natural habitats highlights positive-sum relationships between wild animal welfare and more conventional concerns, such as mitigating climate change. A program at a prominent university like NYU may increase Stakeholder Buy-in by increasing mere familiarity with the topic. Once new members to the movement become more accustomed to thinking about wildlife in terms of individuals' experiences, they might become receptive to the idea that mitigating non-anthropogenic welfare harms is a moral priority.

Benchmarks

• Increased scientific knowledge about wild animal welfare. In particular, leadership would want to see evidence within around 50 years that the movement as a whole has gained the capability required for implementing large-scale interventions.
• Increased political will. For example, passing initiatives to help wild animals in the New York City government might be a reasonable near-term goal, while the movement could strive to pass resolutions that benefit wild animals at the United Nations in the medium-term.

Bottlenecks

• Insufficient funding to scale. Existing Funding is sufficient for the program's current activities, but not for scaling up their activities and hiring additional staff. With more funding, they would offer multi-year contracts, which are necessary to attract the best talent.
• Little existing infrastructure. Secondary materials to teach courses on wild animal welfare do not exist yet. There are few senior academics to mentor junior scholars. The career path for students who would enroll in their degree-granting programs will also remain unclear until the field is better established.

Animal Ethics

Animal Ethics was founded by Leah McKelvie, Daniel Dorado, and Oscar Horta in 2013. Their work is "aimed not at stopping particular ways in which animals are harmed (which other organizations are already addressing), but at achieving a shift in attitudes towards the moral consideration of animals and speciesism, wild animal suffering, and longtermism, which are severely neglected in animal advocacy." Their annual budget is currently around $200,000 USD, though in some years it is less than $100,000 USD.

Theory of Change

Animal Ethics works toward a large-scale shift in Stakeholder Buy-In. Their approach is mostly "broad longtermist." The longtermism component reflects a belief that they can have the largest impact by affecting how humans regard animals over the long-term future. No matter how exactly the future plays out, more animals will exist in the future than exist right now. In certain scenarios, animals may face novel threats on an even larger scale (e.g., if humans colonize other planets and bring animals with them). The "broad" modifier indicates that Animal Ethics is not banking on any one scenario about what will happen in the long-term future.

Spreading moral consideration for animals is both "broad" and "longtermist." If successful, the impact could be long-lasting, as a collective realization that all suffering matters morally– regardless of species, and regardless of what caused the suffering– is unlikely to simply disappear once it is widespread. A shift in attitudes toward animals is broad in the sense that it affects attitudes towards all issues affecting animals. Individuals who robustly support the moral consideration of animals may not even foresee that it will eventually be feasible to help wild animals at scale. But once such interventions are available, they would support their implementation. As part of their broad longtermist approach, Animal Ethics also works to increase concern about the long-term future and awareness about longtermism among animal advocates and other key actors that can have a positive impact for future animals.

Creating a wide-scale shift in attitudes requires Outreach to the public, especially to some key audiences that may be especially influential. Animal Ethics attempts to increase its readership by making its website available in 11 different languages. Wild animal welfare is prominent in their content, with wild animal suffering receiving its own tab and a 28-part video course. They also promote the ideas that all sentient beings matter, regardless of cognitive complexity or whether they live now or in the future, on social media. One group they are particularly keen to reach is new generations, especially those among them who are already sympathetic to or involved in animal advocacy. Their attitudes towards animals may not be entrenched yet, and they can be influential in the future for a longer time. Activities to reach young people include offering university courses on animal ethics, and training secondary school teachers to discuss speciesism in classrooms. Animal Ethics has also conducted some Scientific Research on how to customize outreach efforts to particular audiences. For example, they conducted interviews and a survey to determine what types of research about wild animal welfare would receive support from biologists and veterinary scientists. They also conducted a survey of the attitudes of "Generation Z" toward helping wild animals.

Animal Ethics believes this general broad longtermist approach can successfully be combined with more targeted ones that have a more predictable effect on the trajectory of the long-term future. Some of these more context-specific approaches are outlined in Figure 4, their theory of change for wild animals in particular. For example, they have been aiding in the establishment of wild animal welfare science as an academic field. This would help to gain the knowledge needed to successfully design measures to help wild animals, it would give prestige and credibility to the cause, and would make it easier for policy makers to implement such measures. Another more targeted approach consists in spreading concern about wild animals among animal advocates. This can lead them to engage in wild animal advocacy, thus increasing the amount of resources invested in the cause area. This, in turn, can help change the attitudes of the public, which in turn should cause key decision-makers responsive to public sentiment to implement measures that help wild animals.

Figure 4. Animal Ethics's theory of change diagram for their wild animal welfare work

Benchmarks

• Increased prestige within academia. Animal Ethics mentioned three metrics that should grow over time: high-quality peer-reviewed papers in biology journals, dedicated university programs, and an academic society (analogous to the Society for Conservation Biology).
• Increased concern among animal advocates. An initial benchmark would be that a major animal advocacy organization begins a campaign on an issue in wild animal welfare. Subsequently, the amount of money and resources they commit to wild animal welfare campaigns should grow. A softer metric would be that major animal advocacy organizations begin including wild animal issues in their messaging.
• Increase awareness of wild animal suffering. Animal Ethics would put stock in surveys showing increased familiarity with wild animal welfare over time.

Bottlenecks

• Insufficient funding. Animal Ethics has ideas for initiatives that they have not pursued due to uncertainty about funding. Leadership worries that there may be little funding available for organizations at the intersection of longtermism and animal welfare: Funders interested in longtermism appear mostly focused on humans, whereas animal welfare funders are mostly interested in short-term outcomes.
• Low baseline concern for wild animal suffering among key stakeholders. Animal Ethics hopes that generational turnover in academia will improve the effectiveness of academic outreach.

Animal Charity Evaluators

Animal Charity Evaluators was founded in 2013 after a merger between nonprofits Justice for Animals and Effective Animal Activism. Their mission "is to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals." Its operating budget is roughly $1,800,000 USD per year.

Theory of Change

Animal Charity Evaluators' theory of change (see Figure 3) addresses three bottlenecks to the animal advocacy movement reaching its full potential. First, greater funding is necessary for organizations to achieve stability and pursue more ambitious interventions. For greater funding to make a difference, however, it should be directed at the most effective organizations. Second, the movement needs better evidence on which to base strategic decisions. Third, the movement needs to invest in a synergistic and strategic plurality of interventions, animal groups, and countries to ensure a resilient movement ecosystem.

Tying Grantmaking to Organization Evaluation enables Animal Charity Evaluators to increase funding for the most effective charities. By making the charity evaluations public, Animal Charity Evaluators also improves the evidence base of the movement, allowing organizations and funders to learn more about what makes the most effective organizations successful. They evaluate animal charities on a set of criteria encompassing impact potential, cost-effectiveness, room for additional funding, and organizational health. As of 2023, evaluated charities receive "Recommended Charity" status for two years. Although the charities they evaluate help multiple types of animals using a variety of strategies, they only have two priority animal groups— Farmed animals and Wild animals. The Recommended Charity Fund allows their audience to make contributions to all Recommended Charities at once.

The Movement Grants Program is a separate crowdsourced Grantmaking effort, designed to improve evidence and pluralism. It disburses money to organizations that "use novel interventions, target large numbers of animals, and operate in regions that are underrepresented in animal advocacy." The fund supports groups that are too small to be evaluated for Recommended Charity status, and facilitates experimentation with new tactics.

Figure 5. Animal Charity Evaluators' theory of change diagram

Animal Charity Evaluators is in theory equally well-positioned to advance all three preconditions necessary for helping wild animals at scale. In practice, though, their opportunities are constrained by the activities of existing animal charities. It appears as though their options for supporting wild animals have been limited. Wild Animal Initiative and Faunalytics are the only current recommended charities in the Reducing Wild Animal Suffering category.⁹ Of their total 2022 Movement Grants ($910,00 USD), 1.4% went to work focused on wild animals. For example, they spent $10,000 to support an initiative to require bird-safe glass in Washington D.C. 6.4% of $811,00 went to wild animals in 2023. For example, they gave $19,500 to a campaign against inhumane culling of pigeons in French cities. They did not receive any applications in the past two years specifically to address non-anthropogenic threats. In 2024, they are supporting a two-day summit on wild animal welfare organized by the NYU wild animal welfare program.

Benchmarks

• The field has increased capacity to conduct studies. Presumably, this mainly involves greater funding and a larger number of researchers who have relevant expertise.
• Dissemination of study results to a wider audience. In particular, they mentioned that neighboring academic fields like compassionate conservation currently have low awareness of the new and growing academic field of wild animal welfare.

Bottlenecks

• Limited Funding. Their 2023-2024 Strategic Plan notes that they want to increase outreach to those beyond the animal advocacy movement to grow the overall amount of funding available, and reduce dependence on a small number of large funders.
• Limited understanding of wild animal welfare among their audience. Leadership said that having some earmarked funds for supporting wild animal welfare may help demonstrate that it is a priority for them.
• Lack of capacity to evaluate charities' effects on wild animals. Even organizations that do not nominally work on wild animal welfare may affect wild animals indirectly. Most obviously, charities that reduce meat consumption will also reduce the amount of land that is used for agriculture. The future use of that land may change the number or composition of wild animals, which presumably affects their aggregate welfare. Animal Charity Evaluators lack the resources to evaluate whether the farmed animal charities they support have a positive or negative impact on wild animals. Even if they could task staff with considering this issue during charity evaluations, there is little relevant evidence to consult.

Commonalities in Theories of Change and Activities

There were notable similarities in organizations' theories of change and beliefs about the broader movement. This convergence could mean that the evidence for how to best advance the movement is clear-cut. Alternatively, organizations could have shared biases from influencing each other. Or, groups may simply possess similar professional backgrounds and skills.

Academic Outreach is the Main Strategy

All organizations are to some degree focused on Academic Outreach. Academic outreach has the virtue of advancing all three preconditions. Ecologists and biologists are the only audience that has the training to improve Valid Measurement. Many of the applied scientists that would advance Technical Ability either work in academia or were at least trained in it. Ideas that eventually gain Stakeholder Buy-In in the mainstream often originate within academia. The young people who carry new ideas into the next generation may receive their first exposure to them while enrolled at a university.

Furthermore, developing the capacity to help wild animals at scale is an enterprise that will require the involvement of thousands of people over decades, if not centuries. It is not sustainable for any one organization to guide the research priorities of the movement indefinitely. Building a community that is focused on investigating the right questions will ensure that the movement stays on track.

Cautious Messaging about Controversial Interventions

The interviewed organizations have a cautious approach towards recommending interventions, especially large-scale ones. To take an extreme example, none of the organizations interviewed expressed enthusiasm for intentionally eliminating existing ecosystems to reduce the number of unhappy wild animals, an idea that is at least taken seriously in theoretical discussions (Fischer, 2022; Tomasik, 2015). This is likely in part due to uncertainty whether attempts to reduce natural ecosystems are good on the whole. Wild Animal Initiative, for instance, emphasizes the need to develop responsible interventions when explaining their vision for a scientific field dedicated for wild animal welfare. Animal Charity Evaluators explicitly depicts habitat destruction as negative and promotes habitat preservation (Baines, 2023). Similarly, the interviewed organizations expressed caution around irreversible interventions. Their focus for now is on maintaining option value for the ecosystem and for the wild animal welfare movement.

Optics concerns may loom just as large. Commentators have already begun to notice and criticize enthusiasm for reducing wild animal populations within effective altruism, a movement with ties to wild animal welfare (Lenman, 2022; Marris, 2023). As the movement grows its prominence, it seems likely that more and more critics will associate it with controversial alterations of natural habitats. Leadership at NYU's Wild Animal Welfare program told us that "It’s valuable to conceive of the field as multidisciplinary, pluralistic and to focus on things that other people will find sympathetic, like undoing human harms and co-benefits." Animal Ethics urges discretion when discussing the potential desirability of large-scale interventions, "it may be useful in some very specific cases to mention other possible ways that could help larger numbers of animals but that are much more controversial. As a general rule, however, it might be better not to address these methods."

Greater Focus on Mammals and Birds

The profiled organizations have mostly dedicated resources to mammals and birds so far. The main exception is that Wild Animal Initiative has funded some projects on octopuses, crickets, caterpillars, and fishes, and requested proposals on wild fishes in their 2023 seed grant round. Until wild animal welfare science is more established, it may attract more members by focusing on mammals and birds, insofar as researchers already believe individual members of these groups have intrinsic moral value. The arguments in favor of focusing on the most abundant taxa require a level of Stakeholder Buy-In among academics that may not exist yet.

Room for More Funding

The organizations profiled here in total spends at most 4.9 million USD per year, less than half of a previous upper-end estimate of 10 million (Spurgeon, n.d.). For context, as of 2020 donors spend about 200 million USD per year on farmed animal welfare (Farmed Animal Funders, 2021), and companion animal welfare receives over 2.5 billion USD each year in the U.S. alone (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2024).¹⁰ Moreover, Animal Charity Evaluators, Welfare Footprint, and (to a lesser extent) Animal Ethics spend a significant portion of their resources on issues other than wild animal welfare.

All organizations felt as though they had more room for funding to pursue their goals. When asked how they would spend an additional million dollars in funding earmarked for wild animal welfare, many of the answers related to solidifying the field's foothold in academia, such as seeding interdisciplinary centers at universities beyond NYU, hiring postdoctoral fellows, and creating an endowment for wild animal welfare science projects.

Gaps Unfilled by Current Activities

Scientific Resources Focused on the Most Abundant Taxa

Several other taxa outnumber mammals and birds, such as invertebrates, fishes, and perhaps amphibians and reptiles (Bar-On et al., 2018, Table S1; Greenspoon et al., 2023; Tomasik, 2009). All else equal, allocating resources to more abundant groups of animals is more cost-effective. Newcomers of the movement must eventually appreciate that the most abundant taxa might have a decisive influence on whether interventions actually improve aggregate welfare. Allocating further resources to research on the welfare of the most abundant taxa might spark discussion of how large-scale interventions would affect them.

Targeted Outreach Beyond Academia

Focusing solely on academic outreach has its risks. There may be other important groups to target. For example, none of the interviewed organizations are directly involved in political lobbying or legal work¹¹, even though Animal Ethics lists "People working in policy and law" as an important group to target. Animal Ethics is considering doing outreach to policymakers to fill the gap. The NYU Wild Animal Welfare program is also getting involved in policy briefs (White et al., 2024).

Also, it is possible that outreach to academics will fail to build a scientific field. Or, the field may develop apace, but discover that is simply too difficult to measure aggregate welfare in complex ecosystems. Possibly, helping wild animals at scale is doomed in these scenarios. Alternatively, it might be possible to develop alternative theories of change that rely less on directly advancing Valid Measurement, which would allow the movement to diversify its strategy, reducing its overall risk of failure. For example, a policy of undoing anthropogenic harms could in many cases proceed without significant advances in Valid Measurement.

Implementation of Interventions

None of the interviewed organizations are directly funding or implementing interventions to help wild animals right now, aside from the small grants Animal Charity Evaluators have provided to promote bird-safe glass and more humane control of pigeon populations. Wild Animal Initiative has put out calls to analyze the effects of interventions that could be implemented in the near future (see their Available Projects and Seed Grants Program, 2023, p. 3), though they do not intend to fund the implementation of these interventions themselves.

There are sound reasons to avoid rushing into interventions. Most obviously, they could go awry, harming the affected wild animals and reducing Stakeholder Buy-In. With so many wild animals available to help in the future, hindering the growth of the movement just as it is getting started would be rash. Perhaps more insidiously, the intervention could succeed in achieving its stated aims, but unbeknownst to observers (due to insufficient Valid Measurement) do more harm than good. The movement may feel emboldened to apply the intervention elsewhere, and cite it as evidence that helping wild animals at scale is possible. Available options may also not be particularly cost-effective, at least in terms of their direct, intended effects. With insufficient Technical Ability and Stakeholder Buy-in, most large-scale interventions are not feasible right now.

On the other hand, the movement is unlikely to reap practical benefits of Outreach efforts for many years. In the meantime, wild animals are the most abundant group of animals on Earth, and may urgently need help. Although available options are not cost-effective in their own right, they may become cost-effective once one accounts for their positive indirect effects. For example, Šimčikas (2022) speculates that, "Public campaigns to reduce aquatic noise (e.g., campaigns against seismic surveys) could help normalize the care for small wild animals by discussing how noise might cause stress to them and how this is bad for its own sake (not just because it’s bad for the environment)."

That said, it is unclear whether wild animal interventions that are feasible now have large indirect effects on preconditions like Stakeholder Buy-In. For one, the most feasible interventions are those that would be primarily justified on grounds other than animal welfare. Šimčikas (2022) continues:

Doing [public campaigns] in a context where most people already agree with our conclusions for environmental or conservationist reasons would make it more likely that people agree with those arguments, although they may not contemplate them deeply. But my guess is that the effects of such interventions on the attitudes of the public and academia would likely be very minor.

Interventions that could be justified on animal welfare grounds would probably need to already have high acceptability, such as mitigating anthropogenic threats, or rescuing animals from non-anthropogenic threats in ways that leave their ecosystems intact. These interventions do not by themselves raise the issue of whether it is desirable to enact interventions that would alter natural ecosystems or their inhabitants. Hence, implementing interventions now may not cause the shift in attitudes needed to eventually implement large-scale interventions. Nevertheless, the movement needs to start somewhere, and interventions that advance other priorities may help increase the acceptability of conducting the kinds of interventions that could only be justified in terms of their benefits to wild animals.

Intervention Development

No organizations are attempting to improve Technical Ability. This could be because a certain amount of advancement in Valid Measurement is necessary to specify what tools or protocols the field needs in the first place. Alternatively, it may be because the profiled organizations comparative advantages simply lie elsewhere, as Intervention Development is not necessarily intractable right now. The FYXX Foundation is developing cheaper, more versatile contraception products that may make pest control much more humane. There are other tools that are discussed in wild animal welfare circles, but are not being developed yet. Howe (2020) estimated that 3.5 quadrillion insects are affected by pesticides a year in the U.S. alone. Empirical research comparing the severity and duration of pain caused by different pest control methods could identify which already available products most painlessly kill pest insects. Alternatively, scientists might be able to design a new pesticide specifically to reduce painfulness without sacrificing efficacy. If the efforts bear fruit, then the movement could incubate an organization to promote the adoption of "humane pesticide" (Tomasik, 2007).

Acknowledgments

This post is a project of Rethink Priorities–a think tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. It was written by Holly Elmore and William McAuliffe. Hannah McKay created Figure 1. Thanks to the interviewees for their time and feedback. Thanks to Daniela Waldhorn, Michael Beaulieu, Simon Eckerström-Liedholm, and Cat Kerr for commenting on the penultimate version of the report. Thanks also to Brian Tomasik, Heather Browning, Kyle Johannsen, Nicolas Delon, Oscar Delaney, and Laura Duffy for feedback on earlier drafts. If you are interested in RP’s work, please visit our research database and subscribe to our newsletter.

References

Alonso, W. J., & Schuck-Paim, C. (2017). Life-fates: Meaningful categories to estimate animal suffering in the wild. Animal Ethics. https://www.animal-ethics.org/life-fates-essay-prize-2017/

Alonso, W. J., & Schuck-Paim, C. (2021). Pain-Track: A time-series approach for the description and analysis of the burden of pain. BMC Research Notes, 14(1), 229. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-021-05636-2

Animal Charity Evaluators. (n.d.). Apply for Funding. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/movement-grants/apply-for-funding/

Animal Charity Evaluators. (n.d.). How we prioritize causes. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-reviews/causes-we-consider/

Animal Charity Evaluators. (n.d.). Charity evaluation criteria. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-reviews/evaluating-charities/evaluation-criteria/

Animal Ethics. (n.d.-a). About us. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.animal-ethics.org/about-us/

Animal Ethics. (2022). Strategic considerations for effective wild animal suffering work. Animal Ethics. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.animal-ethics.org/strategic-considerations-for-effective-wild-animal-suffering-work/

Animal Ethics. (2020). Wild animal suffering video course. Retrieved February 28, 2024, from https://www.animal-ethics.org/wild-animal-suffering-video-course/

Baines, H. (2023, September 22). What are some of the biggest threats to wildlife? Animal Charity Evaluators. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/threats-to-wildlife/

Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018a). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506–6511. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

Devitt, J. (2022). NYU Launches Wild Animal Welfare Program. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from http://www.nyu.edu/content/nyu/en/about/news-publications/news/2022/september/nyu-launches-wild-animal-welfare-program

Faria, C. (2023). Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009119948

Faunalytics (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://faunalytics.org/

Fenwick, C. (2023). Longtermism: A call to protect future generations. https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/

Fischer. (2022). Two challenges to Johannsen on habitat destruction. Philosophia, 50, 865–873.

Forristal, B. (2022). Wild animal suffering. Retrieved February 28, 2024, from https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/wild-animal-welfare/

FYXX Foundation – Wildlife Population Management Without Killing. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.fyxxfoundation.org/

Herbivorize Predators. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://herbivorizepredators.org/

Johannsen, K. (2020). Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering. Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved February 28, 2024, from

Lenman, J. (2022). How effective altruism lost the plot. IAI TV - Changing How the World Thinks. https://iai.tv/articles/how-effective-altruism-lost-the-plot-auid-2284

Marris, E. (2023). The Trouble With Algorithmic Ethics. Sierra Club. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/trouble-algorithmic-ethics-effective-altruism

McAuliffe, W. (2024). Three preconditions for helping wild animals at scale. Rethink Priorities.

Sentience Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2024, from http://www.sentienceinstitute.org/

Šimčikas, S. (2022). Reducing aquatic noise as a wild animal welfare intervention. Rethink Priorities. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/reducing-aquatic-noise

Society for Conservation Biology. (n.d.). Who we are. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://conbio.org/about-scb/who-we-are

Soryl, A. A., Moore, A. J., Seddon, P. J., & King, M. R. (2021). The Case for Welfare Biology. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 34(2), 7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-021-09855-2

Spurgeon, J. (n.d.) Helping wild animals. Retrieved February 28, 2024, from https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas/animal-welfare/wild-animals

Tomasik, B. (2009). How many wild animals are there? Retrieved February 28, 2024, from https://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/

Tomasik, B. (2007). Humane insecticides. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://reducing-suffering.org/humane-insecticides/

Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.7358/rela-2015-002-toma

Tomasik, B. (n.d.). Essays on Reducing Suffering. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://reducing-suffering.org/#wild-animal_suffering

Utility Farm. (2020). https://web.archive.org/web/20200729200143/http://utility.farm/

Vegan Hacktivists (n.d.). Wild Animal Suffering. Retrieved from wildanimalsuffering.org

Welfare Footprint Project. (n.d.). The better chicken commitment. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://welfarefootprint.org/broilers

Welfare Footprint Project. (n.d.). Pain Compare. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://welfarefootprint.org/compare/

Welfare Footprint Project. (n.d.). Wild Animal Welfare. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://welfarefootprint.org/research-projects/wild-animal-welfare-2/

White, E., Sebo, J., Franks, B., Minelli, A., Wyman, K.M., Krupa, D.,...Caplan, A. (2024). Wild animal welfare in local policies on land use and the built environment. Retrieved March 21, from https://guarinicenter.org/document/wild-animal-welfare-in-local-policies-on-land-use-and-the-built-environment/

Wild Animal Initiative. (n.d.). Announcing Wild Animal Initiative. Retrieved January 10,

2024, from https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/announcing-wai

Wild Animal Initiative. (n.d.). Available projects airtable. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://airtable.com/appVqPFWlj94setiZ/shrdo5F6p8IlsEqxK/tblgKlZk0HUYL4GE5/viwrhbEUYIajI3mLu/recm3yYIdgSn64QRG

Wild Animal Initiative. (n.d.). Grants—Fellowships. Wild Animal Initiative. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/grants/fellowships

Wild Animal Initiative. (n.d.). Wild Animal Initiative funds 26 new wild animal welfare projects. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/small-grants-2023

Wild Animal Welfare Committee. (2023). https://www.wawcommittee.org

Wild-Animal Suffering Research. (2019). https://web.archive.org/web/20190125204716/https://was-research.org/

World Animal Protection. Wildlife. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/our-campaigns/wildlife/

Appendix 1: Interview Template

Pre-interview worksheet

We’d like a snapshot of your org. If you’re able to share, we would appreciate knowing:

• Size (number of full-time and part-time employees)
• Rough annual budget
• Notable accomplishments
• History: Is there anything you’d like to share about how your organization has changed over the years?
• What is your moral framework?
  • Founding inspiration vs mature philosophy?
• How risk averse are you and why? (Are you trying to limit downside risk?)

If your org already has a written theory of change, link or paste it here!

If not, let’s make the implicit explicit. Here’s a brief written explanation and a short video tutorial of the components of a theory of change, or ToC. You can enter your ToC components into this table.

Vision
DO THIS FIRST. A theory of change starts first with your ultimate vision. This is the result you want– the way you want the world to look. Your vision doesn’t have to be something your org alone has to be able to achieve, but more like what you are fighting for.
Impact	Longer-term outcomes		Shorter-term outcomes	Activities
What is the impact in the world, and ultimately on wild animals, of your outputs? How does this lead to your Vision being achieved?	What are the longer-term results of your activities?		What are the results of your activities in the short term?	What concrete actions does your org do?
Assumptions Why do you believe your theory will bear out?
Context What context do your assumptions and ToC depend on?

Vision
Impact	Longer-term outcomes		Shorter-term outcomes	Activities
Assumptions
Context

Interview questions

1. Sketch out/review ToC
2. Discuss vision
   1. Do you think your vision is different from the other WAW orgs? Why or why not?
3. Assumptions
   1. Moral theory
      1. Risk preferences
      2. Moral preferences
   2. Timelines
      1. Climate change
      2. Transformative technology
4. Context
   1. Other orgs
   2. Existence of certain funders
5. What are benchmarks you are looking out for to assess progress in WAW?
6. What are the bottlenecks to your work?
   1. What do you see as bottlenecks to the field? I.e. is there different work you would do if certain bottlenecks were cleared?
7. Are there any obvious gaps in your mind in your activities or your strategy? Are there things you would love for other orgs to do, or to hire someone new to do?
8. Anything else about your expected impact and strategy that you'd like to add or clarify...?
9. What would you do with $1 million earmarked for WAW right now?
10. We’re writing a report on the WAW Landscape for Open Philanthropy. If you were reading such a report, what would make it useful for you?

Notes

---

1. See this video course, multiple monographs (Faria, 2023; Johannsen, 2020), guides to career development and charitable giving (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2023; Forristal, 2022; Giving What We Can, n.d.), an interactive website, the "Reducing Suffering" blog, and numerous journal articles (e.g., Soryl et al., 2021; Waldhorn, 2019).  ↩

2. Herbivorizing Predators also broadly operates within this worldview. We did interview them for additional context on the movement, but due to their limited activities so far and our time constraints we did not profile them here. We also considered profiling Faunalytics and Sentience Institute, but they both told us that they do not currently have a program specific to wild animal welfare.  ↩

3. Namely, Cameron Meyer-Shorb and Mal Graham of Wild Animal Initiative, Cynthia Shuck-Paim and Wladimir Alonso of Welfare Footprint, Oscar Horta of Animal Ethics, Stien van der Ploeg and Elisabeth Ormandy of Animal Charity Evaluators, and Jeff Sebo of New York University.  ↩

4. This taxonomy probably overlooks some activities that could plausibly advance wild animal welfare. However, it does cover all programs that the five organizations are currently implementing. ↩

5. We justify this framework in our companion report, Three Preconditions for Helping Wild Animals at Scale (McAuliffe, 2024).  ↩

6. Note that not all of the activities necessarily have an impact on all of the Intervention Preconditions. ↩

7. Among other kinds of professional support, their Outreach program helps scientists find additional funding sources beyond Wild Animal Initiative. ↩

8. See their work on wild macaws (Alonso & Schuck-Paim, 2017) and boars.  ↩

9. Animal Charity Evaluators categorize the charities they evaluate as General Animal Advocacy, Shelters and Sanctuaries, Veterinary, Industrial Agriculture, Animal Testing and Vivisection, Entertainment, Cultured and Plant-Based Food Tech, Legal and Legislative, Capacity Building, Reducing Wild Animal Suffering, and Fur Industry.  ↩

10. Of course, the discrepancy between funding for wild animals and other types of animals would be smaller if one accounted for all organizations that aim to help wild animals. Similarly, organizations with a similar philosophical perspective to the organizations profiled here probably receive only a small fraction of the total funding allocated to helping farmed and companion animals. ↩

11. One exception is that Wild Animal Initiative submitted a comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opposing the use of a pesticide on urban pigeons. ↩