Wild Animal Welfare Donation Opportunities & Room for More Funding

Authors: Tristan Katz, Olaia Freiría, Richard Parr, Hannah Tookey, Cameron Meyer Shorb
Managers: Alyse Spiehler, William McAuliffe

Executive Summary

This document summarizes donation opportunities for wild animal welfare (WAW) and estimates the movement’s room for more funding (RFMF) based on data provided by key WAW organizations.

The following pages provide Rethink Priorities’ rationale for prioritizing wild animals, followed by a detailed report of each organization’s theory of change, the activities it would pursue if granted substantially more funding, as well as its track record and evaluation measures. Each RFMF estimate is presented by the respective organizations as a range: the lower bound reflects activities that could effectively bolster each organization’s current strategy, and the higher bound reflects impactful activities that they would pursue only if granted sufficient additional funding to pursue a more ambitious strategy.

Note: This document should not be taken as a direct endorsement by Rethink Priorities of any of these organizations or their RFMF estimates. Rethink Priorities provided the framework for this work, but each organization prepared its own RFMF estimate. The Rethink Priorities’ Animal Welfare Department also provided one of the reports and RFMF estimates.

Summary of Donation Opportunities

Table 1: Summary of Donation Opportunities and RFMF Estimates

Why Fund Wild Animal Welfare?

Scale. Wild animals make up the vast majority of sentient beings in the world, and many suffer severe hardship and die before reaching adulthood. The scale of individuals currently suffering is, to our knowledge, unmatched by any other cause.

Neglectedness. WAW-focused work remains incredibly neglected: the organizations described in this document represent almost the entire field, with few other actors (such as Faunalytics and Welfare Footprint Institute) doing supportive work.^[1] Although the presented organizations have been able to secure funding for their current activities, the funding remains unstable due to a reliance on a small number of funders who face competing priorities.

There is potential tractability. Although still young, WAW is now becoming a respected academic field, and scoping work has identified a number of possible near-term interventions. How tractable such interventions are remains uncertain, but the problem’s scale and neglectedness justify investigating this further. The organizations covered in this report collectively have the capacity to:

• Advance the research needed to identify which interventions are likely to be effective
• Garner public support
• Encourage policymakers to implement promising programs and
• Monitor and evaluate the outcomes

1. The Strategic Stage of the WAW Movement

Over the last few years, the efforts of the movement have been focused on spreading awareness in academic circles and the Effective Altruism movement about wild animal suffering, as well as developing strong scientific foundations and a research community.^[2] This has seen significant progress, with the talent in the movement steadily growing and one research center established at NYU.

While we think it would be beneficial for this work to continue, the movement’s next steps should focus on introducing WAW to policymaking institutions and on promising interventions. We also suspect that developments in AI in the coming years can rapidly increase the feasibility of interventions, creating a greater need to normalize concern for WAW across populations and governments.

2. How WAW Organizations Fit Together

Progress on wild animal welfare likely requires a mix of awareness-raising, foundational and scientific research, talent development, and policy work to ensure that interventions are implemented. Each organization contributes to a different set of these activities:

• Animal Ethics helps raise awareness of the suffering of wild animals and builds a talent pipeline through education and outreach.
• Wild Animal Initiative builds the scientific groundwork for WAW by conducting foundational research and encouraging the growth of WAW as a scientific research field.
• NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program provides academic leadership in wild animal welfare research, with a multidisciplinary, policy-oriented focus.
• The Center for Wild Animal Welfare translates WAW research into concrete policy asks and lobbies governments to adopt them.
• Rethink Priorities Animal Welfare Department supports the ecosystem by filling research gaps, providing strategic coordination, and funding new organizations.

Donation Options in Detail

This section presents reports written by each organization covering:

• Their theory of change
• Current strategy
• The more ambitious strategy they would pursue with substantial additional funding
• Their track record, and
• Evaluation measures.

The reports have been lightly edited by Rethink Priorities.

1. Animal Ethics

Animal Ethics is an international animal advocacy organization that works on education and capacity building on neglected but high-impact interventions, such as wild animal suffering, future risks to animals, and harms to invertebrates.

Primary contact: Aditya S. Karanam

Theory of Change

Animal Ethics works to build the academic legitimacy, social awareness, and will needed to improve the welfare of wild animals. Our main activity includes the creation of open-access educational resources such as courses, videos, texts, and bibliographic compilations, which we deploy through three complementary channels:

• Academic outreach and university courses
• Work with animal advocates, animal organizations, and those interested in the effective altruism community
• Engagement with the general public

The underlying mechanism we envision is one of cultural and institutional change: as more researchers, advocates, and others from broader, potentially sympathetic audiences become familiar with the field, it can gain the prestige and momentum needed for research to scale and consolidate, for more organizations to prioritize the cause, and for concern about the issue to reach sufficient social scale to move decision-makers to act. Our work builds on and complements that of other wild animal advocacy organizations, which focus primarily on developing the scientific knowledge base: we work to expand the ecosystem of people and institutions that recognize the importance of that work and are willing to support it and act on it. A key assumption underlying this theory of change is that decision-makers will implement meaningful measures such as increased research funding, welfare-informed legislation, and institutional programs once sufficient knowledge exists and public and political concern has reached a critical mass.

Current Strategy

Animal Ethics maintains a comprehensive website on animal ethics, including wild animal welfare, available in 13 languages, a key tool for shaping how AI systems understand and reproduce information about animals. In 2026, the main wild animal welfare programs are:

• A short documentary, featuring international academic experts, outreach materials, and workshops, produced in collaboration with the University of the Basque Country (EHU), with Spanish government funding
• A pilot fellowship on animal ethics at Delhi University colleges linked to the National Education Policy 2020 advisory, replicable to other Indian universities
• Courses at Brazilian universities where students receive academic credits
• We are also disseminating our AI & Animals and Seantience documentaries, which feature content on wild animals

The projected milestones are:

• 2027–2028
  • Expanding courses to new universities in India and Brazil
  • Producing a second documentary
  • Developing new educational resources
  • Translating and dubbing materials into different languages
  • Giving talks at key institutions, including the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, the Wildlife Institute of India, and Compassionate Conservation scholars
  • A course on space governance and expanding life to other planets for relevant audiences.
• 2028–2030
  • Scaling content across new universities and countries
  • Expanding to other regions
  • Launching a free open-license course system for educators and advocates globally

Ambitious Strategy

With substantial additional funding, Animal Ethics would pursue a significantly more ambitious strategy across two main areas. On the audiovisual side, we would produce a more ambitious version of the documentary for international distribution on a major streaming platform, with versions in multiple languages, including Chinese. This would allow us to reach audiences far beyond those we currently target, bringing wild animal welfare science to the general public at scale. We have existing contacts in Chinese-speaking regions that would support both distribution and dissemination in that market. On the education side, we would accelerate and expand the open-license course platform to cover a wider range of languages and regions, with a particular focus on Chinese-speaking countries alongside the English- and Spanish-speaking markets already in our current strategy. This would be accompanied by a larger investment in dissemination campaigns with broader reach, including targeted outreach in China. Both tracks would require hiring dedicated staff for content production, translation coordination, and regional outreach, which we would phase in gradually to ensure quality and organizational efficiency. Together, these investments would allow Animal Ethics to move from a model of institutional adoption in specific countries to a genuinely global presence, reaching educators, students, and the general public across the regions where the wild animal welfare movement most needs to grow.

Track Record

• 2026
  • Produced and released the documentary AI & Animals
• 2025
  • Produced and released the documentary/campaign Seantience (English & Spanish)
  • Expanded the website to 13 languages (incl. Arabic, Japanese)
  • Ran eight university courses in Brazil with 2,000+ participants
  • Published a 12-book collection on animal ethics in Portuguese (7,000+ downloads)
  • Launched a Hindi video course on wild animal suffering
  • 10 university talks across India and several webinars with allied organizations (2025–26)
• 2024
  • Built a network of 1,300+ educators with free teaching resources.

How We Evaluate Impact

Table 2: Animal Ethics impact evaluation

See Animal Ethics’s financials and future plans spreadsheet for details.
How to give/next steps: For general inquiries, contact us here. For inquiries about donations, contact us here.

2. Center for Wild Animal Welfare

The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) influences governments to make their policies better for wild animal welfare and to normalize the consideration of wild animal welfare in policymaking.

Primary contact: Richard Parr MBE

Theory of Change

Our theory of change is illustrated here.

Only governments have the capacity and authority to make large-scale changes affecting wild animals. In the long run, influencing public policy is a necessary condition for significantly improving wild animal welfare at scale.

We undertake policy-focused research to develop concrete policy recommendations that will improve the welfare of wild animals. We then engage with policymakers (e.g., government ministers and officials, and parliamentarians) to influence them to adopt these policies.

We also engage with other stakeholders (e.g., animal and environmental NGOs, academics) to encourage them to support our policy asks and to engage with policymakers themselves. We communicate with relevant audiences about our work in order to spread our values (e.g., concern for the welfare of individual animals) and our policy recommendations.

This will lead governments to introduce policies that improve the welfare of wild animals. It will also normalize the consideration of wild animal welfare in government policy and encourage other actors to share and act on these values and ideas. This will contribute to sustained improvements in the welfare of wild animals over the long term.

Our work is highly complementary to other WAW organizations. We act as the “transmission belt” that translates research into actionable policy recommendations and helps governments implement them.

Key assumptions include:

• Research can identify specific policy recommendations
• We can access policymakers and decision-makers
• We can frame wild animal welfare issues in a way that connects to policymakers’ and animal NGOs’ existing values and secures their support

Our experience so far is that these assumptions are valid.

Current Strategy

Our baseline path will be to sustain our current two-person team, focused on our priority policy areas: humane rodent control, including promoting rodent fertility control.

Rodenticides and glue traps kill billions of mice, rats, and other animals each year, slowly and painfully. Rodent fertility control is a promising alternative, but the regulatory path to market for such products is precarious and uncertain. We’ve been asked by the UK Government’s Animal Welfare Minister to help convene a stakeholder group of companies and experts to explore ways to make the regulatory pathway for wildlife fertility control more suitable. Through this process, we will develop and advocate for policy recommendations that could spare large numbers of animals immense suffering.

We will also exert pressure on European governments to reduce their use of anticoagulant rodenticides through direct engagement and by creating a “League Table” for humane rodent control policy, to incentivize a “race to the top” among countries.

We will continue to engage when high-impact, time-sensitive policy opportunities arise in the UK, for example, in the UK government’s review of wild animal traps. We will also engage, where capacity allows, at the EU level, for example, working to ensure that reforms to the EU Biocides (animal poisons) regulations consider wild animal welfare.

Ambitious Strategy

If awarded substantial additional funding, we would pursue a more ambitious strategy: expanding to more countries and commissioning more policy-focused research.

We’d hire a dedicated, full-time person to work on EU policy. They would drive change across the whole of Europe—pushing for fundamental reform of EU wildlife fertility control regulations, driving reductions in the use of rodent poisons and traps, and reacting to live and neglected opportunities across relevant EU policy files.

Next, we’d hire a policy expert in the USA, where there is a live window of opportunity to help support restrictions on the use of rodenticides. We’d also work on regulatory reform for wildlife fertility control and monitor and engage on other relevant policy files.

Alongside direct advocacy, we would invest in commissioning policy-focused research. For example, we’d like to produce a comprehensive mapping of the burden of diseases that affect wild animals and identify promising opportunities for interventions (e.g., rabies, avian flu). We’d support academic animal welfare experts in generating and validating policy recommendations, for example, on traps and rodenticides. We’d also commission regulatory experts in biocides and veterinary medicines to scope out the pathways for wildlife fertility control to inform our policy recommendations.

In sum, additional funding would help us drive more impact, in more places, and on a wider range of issues.

Track Record

We’ve been operating full-time since February 2026, and on a part-time, voluntary basis before that. We have:

• Collaborated with leading scientists to write a policy briefing on wild animal fertility control, which was presented directly to the UK’s Animal Welfare Minister. We have been asked by the Minister to convene a group of stakeholders to provide recommendations on reforms to wildlife fertility control regulations in the UK. This could lead to an acceleration in the roll-out of fertility control for mice and rats, potentially replacing painful poisons for large numbers of animals
• Secured the tabling of two amendments which, if they had passed, would have mandated the systemic consideration of wild animal welfare during construction and conservation activities in the UK
• Supported an amendment which would have mandated bird-safe glass in new buildings in the UK, and generated positively-framed media coverage (e.g., in The Guardian)
• Secured sympathetic discussion of wild animal welfare in the UK Parliament (recording here, and transcript here)
• Presented a policy briefing on mole trapping to the Wildlife Crime and Management Policy team at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). We asked Defra to regulate mole traps, which would improve welfare at the time of killing for hundreds of thousands of animals
• Pitched wild animal welfare stories to several journalists, and were extensively quoted in outlets like Euractiv (widely read in the Brussels bubble) and The Vet Times
• Were the only one out of 162 organizations to raise the issue of wild animal welfare when the EU consulted on reforms to their animal poisons regulations

How We Evaluate Impact

We evaluate our impact against concrete targets across the five areas of our theory of change. Below, we set out what we aim to achieve in each area by the end of 2027 and what would count as success.

Influencing Government Policy

Secure at least 1 “major” policy win and 2 “minor” policy wins

A major win might look like (e.g.,) primary legislation, a concrete spending commitment, or a significant regulatory reform. A minor win might look like (e.g.) a limited regulatory change or non-binding guidance. We will only include wins where we estimate that our actions made a substantial (more than 10%) counterfactual contribution, i.e., we think it wouldn’t have happened anyway without us.

Policy moves slowly, so it will take time for CWAW to accrue several major wins. At the same time, we expect that we can secure meaningful improvements in wild animal welfare through minor wins: policy changes that are extremely important to the animals can look like technocratic tweaks.

Our policy objectives include:

• The UK government introduces reforms to the regulations on wildlife fertility control products in a way that will accelerate or widen their deployment
  • Prediction: 10% chance of a major win, 25% chance of a minor win
• The EU introduces reforms to the regulations on wildlife fertility control products in a way that will accelerate or widen their deployment
  • Prediction: 2% chance of a major win, 5% chance of a minor win
• A European national government (or an EU institution) introduces tougher restrictions on the use of second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides or rodent traps
  • Prediction: 25% chance of a major win, 40% chance of a minor win
• The UK government takes action to reform the regulation of mole traps in a way that improves welfare
  • Prediction: 35% chance of a major win, 75% chance of a minor win

Identifying Pro-Welfare Policy Recommendations

Prepare at least 4 policy reports/briefings/pieces of research/consultation responses on novel areas of wild animal welfare policy

These will likely include:

• Publishing a report and policy recommendations on rodent (and potentially wider wildlife) fertility control regulations
  • We will identify reforms to accelerate and widen their deployment as a humane alternative to lethal control
• Publishing a Humane Rodent Management League Table
  • Some European countries have already banned glue traps and restricted the use of anticoagulants. We will publish a League Table comparing different countries and use this to lobby policymakers to “race to the top” on wild rodent welfare
• Mapping the burden of wild animal disease and identifying potential policy recommendations
  • A review mapping the welfare burden of major wild-animal diseases (e.g., avian influenza, rabies, sarcoptic mange) and identifying tractable policy recommendations

Accessing Policymakers

Secure at least 8 meetings with decision-makers (e.g., ministers or officials) and decision-influencers (e.g., backbench MPs/MEPs) on priority policy issues

These will likely include:

• UK decision-makers and officials
  • Defra: Wildlife Crime & Management Policy officials (rodenticides, traps) and the Animal Welfare Minister—e.g., on the wildlife fertility-control stakeholder group we have been asked to convene
  • Health and Safety Executive biocides regulators, on the review of anticoagulant rodenticides
• UK decision-influencers
  • Sympathetic parliamentarians
  • Backbench MPs: members of the EFRA Select Committee and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare
  • Animal Sentience Committee: on the sentience and legal-protection gap for wild animals
• EU decision-makers and officials
  • European Commission DG SANTE: biocides and veterinary medicines units
  • European Commission DG ENV and ECHA: on biocides and biodiversity-relevant files
• EU decision-influencers
  • Members of the European Parliament, including members of the Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals

Convene the UK Government Animal Welfare Minister-requested wildlife fertility control stakeholder group and deliver agreed reform recommendations

Influencing Other Stakeholders

Influence at least 4 other NGOs or stakeholders (e.g., academic experts or organizations) to advocate for policy asks that we have identified

Ensure that CWAW assets/products (e.g., the Humane Rodent Management League Table) are cited or used by ≥3 external actors (e.g., other NGOs or experts)

Communicating Our Values and Ideas to Key Audiences

Generate at least 7 pieces of media coverage that frame wild animal welfare ideas and values in a positive way.

See our financials and future plans spreadsheet for details.

How to give/next steps: Contact Richard Parr MBE, see our website, or donate directly.

3. NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program

The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is a research, outreach, and fieldbuilding program focused on understanding and improving wild animal welfare at scale.

Primary contact: Jeff Sebo

Theory of Change

The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program aims to build the knowledge, capacity, and political will needed for humans to improve our interactions with wild animals at scale. Our core activities are basic and applied research in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and law/policy; outreach to academics, advocates, policymakers, and the public; and fieldbuilding for current and future wild animal welfare researchers and practitioners.

These activities produce outcomes such as new papers and reports, guidance for local and global actors, and stronger research and policy networks. These outcomes can then improve institutional decision-making by helping researchers, advocates, and policymakers identify where wild animals face large-scale harms from human activity or natural processes, where intervention is ethical and effective, and how to evaluate tradeoffs responsibly.

We provide academic leadership for this emerging field, using our platform to increase the credibility and visibility of wild animal welfare research while building partnerships between researchers, advocates, and policymakers. Our Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab is a major focus because cities are excellent sites for policy innovation and leadership, and our work in this area can provide a scalable model for responsible governance.

Current Strategy

At this level, the assumed funding would preserve core Wild Animal Welfare Program activities: maintaining basic program operations, releasing multiple papers and reports, making progress on a forthcoming book, and hosting at least six online events, at least two in-person events, and one larger summit per year. It would also preserve part of our urban wild animal welfare work for one year, and the RFMF request would preserve the remainder, including WILD Lab research staff, research expenses, online resource development, public and private events, continued consultation with city government officials, and research and policy development related to urban wild animal welfare.

Ambitious Strategy

At this level, the assumed funding would once again preserve core activities: maintaining basic program operations, releasing papers and reports, making progress on a forthcoming book, and hosting online events, in-person events, and one larger summit per year. It would also support part of our urban wild animal welfare work for one year, and the RFMF request would support expanded activities both for the program and for its urban lab, including additional research staff, research expenses, online resource development, public and private events, a fellowship or visitor program, continued consultation with city government officials, and a dedicated policy liaison to consult with decision-makers.

This strategy would allow us to pursue a broader portfolio of wild animal welfare work, on topics such as bird-window collisions, behavioral time budget studies, and welfare and conservation messaging research. It would also allow us to better support other wild animal welfare organizations by producing public resources that can strengthen the field as a whole. Finally, it would allow us to hire a dedicated policy liaison to sustain our consultation with city government officials, who are increasingly reading our work, attending our events, and consulting with us on policy development and implementation—creating a scalable model for researcher-policymaker coordination around wild animal welfare.

Track Record

• 2026: Produced a policy report on local policies concerning wildlife management, among other research; expanded consultation with city government officials on wild animal welfare policy; signed a contract with the University of California Press for a book on how cities can be policy leaders for farmed and wild animals.
• 2025: Co-authored a policy report on integrating captive and wild animal health and welfare in the post-2030 sustainable development governance agenda, among other research; launched the Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab as an applied research and policy initiative for urban wild animal welfare.
• 2024: Co-authored a policy report on wild animal welfare in local policies on land use and the built environment, among other research; expanded programming, with talks on animal agency, animal consciousness, and wildlife management, among other events; hosted the first annual Wild Animal Welfare Summit.
• 2023: Launched the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program as the first university program dedicated to wild animal welfare; hired staff and established an affiliate network; hosted a launch event, public talks, a research workshop, and an award/workshop for early-career scholars in wild animal welfare.

How We Evaluate Impact

Table 3: NYU impact evaluation

See our financials and future plans spreadsheet for more details.

How to give/next steps: There are two ways to give: First, you can access the NYU donation portal and enter “Wild Animal Welfare Program” in the designation field. Second, you can contact Jeff Sebo to discuss a gift, and we can then connect you to the NYU Development Office to sign a gift agreement and arrange a wire transfer.

4. Rethink Priorities Animal Welfare Department

Rethink Priorities Animal Welfare Department pioneers evidence-based, reason-driven change to accelerate the end of factory farming and reduce wild animal suffering.

Primary contact: Sagar Shah; Hannah Tookey

Theory of Change

Our ultimate outcome is to reduce wild animal suffering at scale. We pursue this by advancing evidence-based, reason-driven change through three functions:

• Through research, we publish analyses and build tools to help identify viable near-term interventions and their potential impact, surface critical gaps and uncertainties that block progress, and optimize and refine strategies. This enables the movement to count on greater evidence to help wild animals more effectively.
• Through stakeholder engagement, we host convenings and work with advocates and funders to strengthen coordination, align strategies, and develop a shared understanding of challenges and needs. This enables more funders and organizations to ensure that their strategies and decisions are evidence-informed and complement others’.
• Through infrastructure development, we directly address gaps and opportunities that others cannot, or where we are best placed to do so, such as by running talent programs, offering rapid regranting to enable time-sensitive action for wild animals, developing and piloting novel approaches, and providing fiscal sponsorship to growing organizations. This expands the movement’s capacity to act on what we learn and accelerates the piloting of novel and impactful interventions.

Together, these functions enable existing and novel interventions to be scaled and refined.

Our wild animal welfare work sits under our Neglected Animals Program and broadly follows its theory of change (diagram below; PDF version here), although research is currently our most developed function for wild animals, and our stakeholder engagement and infrastructure development functions are at an earlier stage compared to other sub-causes we work on. In the long term, we also aim to build out these functions for wild animals.

Figure 1: RP neglected animals theory of change

Complementarity

We believe that our instrumental focus on advancing near-term interventions nicely complements others’ ongoing efforts in the space. Our talent program focuses on developing non-academic research and program expertise in wild animals, in comparison to the Wild Animal Initiative’s focus on growing the academic field. Our regranting focuses on enabling rapid action when brief opportunities for impact arise that would otherwise go unaddressed if funding had to go through lengthy evaluation processes. Where research results are promising, the eventual incubation of a new project or organization by RP is just one pathway to ensure findings translate into impact, since the WAW movement is still small and other organizations may not have the capacity to implement findings themselves. Before directly incubating a new approach, we would assess the movement landscape and ensure that we are the best fit to do so. To avoid needless duplication of infrastructure, we only incubate new organizations when it becomes clear that no existing organization is well positioned to implement a promising initiative.

Key Assumptions

• The scale of suffering is likely huge.
• Strategy research in this space has unusually high information value. For wild animals, many of the most consequential questions remain unanswered, and answering them well can significantly change which interventions are most impactful. We do not know which wild animal welfare interventions are tractable and cost-effective at scale, and we acknowledge genuine uncertainty about potential side effects, such as ecological disruption and unintended population dynamics. We mitigate this risk by focusing on identifying well-evidenced, low-risk, near-term interventions, while being explicit about what remains unknown. In this context, the expected value of clarifying research is particularly high: a well-targeted research output can update the priorities of many downstream actors simultaneously.
• The wild animal space requires additional strategic stewardship at a critical juncture. Wild animal welfare advocacy is at a genuinely formative stage: movement norms, strategic priorities, and relationships with funders are still being established. The risk is not simply that work is ineffective, but that premature or poorly coordinated action could entrench bad precedents, cause greater immediate harm, or generate reputational damage that sets the field back by years. Organizations with enough capacity and relationships to provide strategic coherence are rare in this space, and we believe our role in helping supply coherence (as we have done for other sub-causes such as fish welfare) at this particular moment may matter as much as some specific deliverables we produce.
• Our research and analysis actually influence decisions. We de-risk this assumption by two structural features of our position. First, we have cultivated close relationships with the advocates and funders who are best positioned to act on our findings. They actively request specific analyses, participate in our convenings, and return to us repeatedly when they face new strategic decisions. Second, rather than producing research and hoping to create demand for it, we focus on routinely eliciting demand to identify where decision-makers face real uncertainties and work backward to the research that would resolve them. This discipline means we are far less likely to produce high-quality work that sits unused.
• Our research and analysis actually create impact. We have strong empirical evidence that our animal welfare work creates impact: major funders have credited our research with influencing grantmaking decisions; advocates across the UK, Europe, and Latin America have cited our work in campaigns; and Shrimp Welfare Project and several funders have credited our foundational research with being essential to the field’s existence. We think this track record substantially reduces the risk that our wild animal welfare research will be adopted.

Current Strategy

The wild animal welfare movement is growing, but translating that momentum into high-impact action without causing harm requires careful consideration. We help advocates and funders navigate this tension.

Our strategy outlined below is intentionally flexible. We prioritize by potential impact, evidence that the work will be used, and confirmation that no one else is better placed to do it, reassessing demand before each project.

Research runs in two strands:

• Expanding the intervention pipeline: We focus on identifying and developing tractable near-term interventions that are sufficiently low-risk to justify early action. In particular, we will expand our recently published Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database to improve its usefulness for decision-makers, and may do further work on humane insecticides.
• Improving strategic decision-making: We address the most pressing unresolved questions that directly affect funding and advocacy decisions, such as the indirect effects of glue trap bans, what AI advances may unlock for monitoring and improving wild animal welfare, and the cost-effectiveness of specific interventions.

Stakeholder engagement will include:

• Movement convenings: We already host the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum and sub-cause-specific coordination forums, and are developing a dedicated initiative to improve coordination in the wild animal space.
• Giving Network: The neglected-animals space can feel opaque to individual donors. We inform mission-aligned stakeholders while protecting the movement strategy that requires discretion.

Infrastructure development will include:

• Talent Program: Wild animal welfare is acutely talent-constrained, with very few people able to navigate its scientific and strategic complexity. To address this, we are currently trialing an Animal Welfare Talent Program that supports talented individuals to develop expertise in neglected animals and other frontiers through direct research and mentorship.
• Regranting via the Neglected Animals Project Fund: We specialize in addressing time-sensitive opportunities that would be challenging for other regrantors to process quickly. We have not yet regranted any funds to wild animal welfare work, but may do so if and when opportunities arise.
• Charity incubation and operations support: We recently began fiscally sponsoring the Center for Wild Animal Welfare through our Special Projects team. We pursue fiscal sponsorship based on the stated needs of new organizations and our assessment of their promise.

Milestones (2026–2030)

Following recently secured funding, we expect to modestly grow our WAW capacity compared to Q1 2026, reaching at least one full-time equivalent in the coming months through a combination of staff time and contractors.

Under our current funding trajectory, each year we aim to:

• Publish at least 1–2 decision-relevant research outputs (e.g., white papers, reports, policy briefs) addressing key intervention levers and decision-relevant uncertainties for wild animals, with evidence that at least 3 funders or organizations use RP analysis to inform funding, advocacy, or strategic decisions. (measured via citations, collaborations, or strategy alignments).
• Organize at least 1 multi-stakeholder convening for wild animals (e.g., workshops, strategy forums, coordination calls).
• Support at least 1 Program Associate focused on wild animals through the Animal Welfare Talent Program. Across the period, we aim for:
  • At least 2 talent Program Associates go on to work substantively on wild animal welfare, whether at RP or another organization.
  • At least 2 research outputs produced with meaningful contribution from Talent Program associates are used or cited by advocacy organizations or funders.

Specific Milestones 

The following milestones have so far been identified as priorities. Further milestones will be determined following the results of the work outlined below.

• By Q2 2027, conduct an in-depth analysis (for example, cost-effectiveness, feasibility, or uncertainty analysis) of at least 5 of the top-rated interventions in the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database to guide advocacy and funding decisions.
• By Q2 2027, identify and evaluate at least 3 tractable, near-term intervention pathways that could plausibly improve wild animal welfare or attract additional investment in the space, and clarify key uncertainties and trade-offs relevant to funders and advocates.
• By Q2 2027, provide research, coordination, or advisory support that contributes to at least 2 external organizations or funders advancing, piloting, or further investigating wild animal welfare interventions.

Ambitious Strategy

With substantial additional funding, our priority would be to scale our existing functions. The binding constraint is the limited number of existing researchers and advocates with the requisite skills to further this work.

Additional funding would therefore primarily support:

1. Increasing the number of WAW-focused Program Associates who take part in our Talent Program. We aim to support at least 1 WAW-focused Program Associate through a full Talent Program pilot in 2027. Dedicated funding beyond that would enable us to increase the number of associates focused on wild animal welfare, supporting 1–2 additional WAW associates per year.
2. Expanding staff capacity—through staff hires or contractors—to expand the depth and throughput of our research: extending the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database, conducting cost-effectiveness analyses of the most promising candidates, and resolving more of the strategic uncertainties that currently hold back funding and advocacy decisions.

How We Evaluate Impact

Table 4: RP Animal Welfare Department impact evaluation

Track Record

• 2026
  • Published a database of existing near-term interventions to reduce wild animal suffering.
  • Helped a major funder reduce uncertainty about whether rodenticide substitution would offset the welfare benefits of glue trap bans.
  • Launched an Animal Welfare Talent Program, supporting Program Associates to develop expertise in wild animal welfare, among other topics.
  • Facilitated introductions between a WAW organization and a major individual donor via the Neglected Animals Giving Network.
• 2025
  • Launched the Neglected Animals Project Fund to enable rapid action on time-sensitive WAW opportunities.
  • In partnership with Wild Animal Initiative, we developed a research agenda outlining the preliminary studies needed to identify more humane insecticides.
  • We broadened the distribution of our earlier research on rodenticide harms, which informed a regional US campaign group’s messaging on rodenticide harms
  • Published our article ‘The Attitudes Towards Wild Animal Welfare Scale’ in PHAIR.
  • Provided consultation to Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) on WAW topics as part of their 2025 Movement Grants and charity evaluations.
• 2024:
  • Influenced two WAW grant decisions by a major funder: a consultation with us led to an ~$85K grant, while our published work helped avert an ~$30K grant to potentially harmful or low-impact work.
  • Produced an overview of strategic considerations for funding WAW and shared it directly with 15+ major donors and funders. A major funder said one of the included reports—our WAW landscape analysis—made them more certain about trialing and funding lower-scale interventions.
• 2023
  • Our work on rodenticides helped influence a ~$700K grant from a major funder to a rodenticides project. The funder said it is unlikely they would have found the grantee as fast without us.
  • Charity Entrepreneurship cited our findings in its decision not to launch a charity for an oral rabies vaccine.
  • Submitted a public comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, supporting its proposed regulations for the distribution of restricted rodenticides.
  • Our rodenticides report series was partly inspired by Spencer Ericson’s investigation into the claims made about Contrapest.
  • Presented our work on rodenticides at the 2023 Animal Advocacy Conference (University of Kent, UK, 2023) and to Research to End Consumption of Animal Products (RECAP; a Slack group; February, 2023).
  • Presented our preliminary manuscript of a psychological scale to study attitudes towards wild animals (Wild Animal Welfare Scale) at the Animal Advocacy Conference (University of Kent, UK, 2023).

See RP’s financials and future plans spreadsheet for details.

How to give/next steps: Email us about donation opportunities.

5. Wild Animal Initiative

Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) is a field-building organization dedicated to understanding and improving the lives of wild animals at scale.

Primary contact: Cameron Meyer Shorb

Theory of Change

Significant knowledge gaps remain about what wild animals’ lives are like and how we can help them—such as how to measure their suffering and welfare, which interventions are possible, which interventions are the most effective, and how to intervene without unintended ecological effects. Research into these kinds of scientific questions is the primary limiting factor in the wild animal welfare movement, and it is most effective when produced within a scientific field that lends rigor, credibility, and visibility to its outputs.

Therefore, Wild Animal Initiative is building a scientific field dedicated to the study of wild animal welfare, the outputs of which will eventually equip advocates and policymakers with data they can rely on to make fully informed decisions about wildlife management and wild animal welfare interventions. We measure the field’s success by three key areas of its progress:

• Knowledge: Information that can inform wild animal welfare management and practice; the purpose of our Research Program.
• Resources: The support systems that make it possible for wild animal welfare scientists to do their work; the purpose of our Grants Program.
• Community: A sustainable network of researchers that provides continuity, support, and exchange of ideas; the purpose of our Services Program.

Figure 2: WAI theory of change

Current Strategy

With moderately more funding in 2026 and 2027, WAI’s core programs can operate at a more meaningful scale. For our Research Program, we plan to finalize and begin executing our internal research agenda (a project that has been a priority of ours for several years), publish 12 to 14 peer-reviewed papers annually (~3x our historical number), present at 11 to 14 conferences annually (~1.5x our historical number), and curate a special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology. We will also produce a “horizon scan” for the field, which will set the stage for a decadal survey: a community-driven, consensus-based agenda for the field’s next decade, modeled loosely after NASA’s Decadal Surveys.

We will also run our full suite of grant types at $1.5M per year without having to pull from our grants’ funding to support other priorities. We will also double our engagement grants fund. We will also partner with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) to launch its wild animal welfare Center of Excellence—a major milestone for the field and a program constrained only by funding, not by stakeholder interest or capacity.

Ambitious Strategy

Our ambitious strategy accelerates WAI’s theory of change at every stage by increasing the field’s capacity and therefore directly addressing its bottlenecks: too few researchers with the right expertise, too little institutional infrastructure, and too many foundational questions still standing between the knowledge we have now and implementable, scalable interventions.

WAI’s internal Research Team will expand to form a pilot research lab—a model that can increase research volume and quality without a proportional increase in management overhead, and that could eventually anchor Centres of Excellence at LJMU or other institutions. Six new fellows per year, supported by dedicated staff and a university-hosted placement, will accelerate the pipeline of researchers with combined expertise in ecology and welfare.

Externally, a larger grants budget funds more advanced-stage projects and opens new opportunities for institutional partnerships. These infrastructure expansions will foster community engagement, enabling more researchers to connect, collaborate, and identify with the field.

Our ambitious strategy also includes two entirely new pathways for growing the field at Wild Animal Initiative. The first is a field research site that supports long-term data collection and multiple simultaneous studies, accelerating the production of new knowledge on wild animal welfare. The other is an endowed professorship—a highly durable way to institutionalize wild animal welfare as a research priority at a university in our network, which would be funded long-term by investment returns on the initial large donation.

Together, these activities shorten the timeline to understanding and improving wild animal welfare at scale, while facilitating new funding opportunities for the field outside of the Effective Altruism community.

Track Record

• 2024–2026
  • Our grantees have published 15 additional papers on wild animal welfare. (Most projects are still ongoing or awaiting publication.)
• 2023–2026
  • Funded 69 research projects with a cumulative $4.7M in grants
  • Published 11 wild animal welfare papers in peer-reviewed journals
  • Presented and networked at 88 scientific conferences
• 2025
  • Joined the Roundtable on Science and Welfare of Animals Involved in Research, housed within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Animal Health Sciences, Conservation, and Research (BAHSCR)
• 2023
  • Developed and launched a workshop on methods in wild animal welfare that was attended by 48 researchers and students

How We Evaluate Impact

Table 5: WAI impact evaluation

See Wild Animal Initiative’s financials and future plans spreadsheet for details.

How to give/next steps: Contact Cameron Meyer Shorb.

1. Note that conservation and wildlife rehabilitation organizations, while comparatively well funded, generally treat welfare as secondary to goals like species survival or biodiversity. There is little evidence that their interventions typically promote WAW overall, although they may benefit particular individuals. ↑
2. For more information, see Elmore, J., & McAuliffe, K. (2024). A landscape analysis of wild animal welfare. Rethink Priorities. ↑