WAI is starting Phase 3 of field-building for wild animal welfare science

Summary

This post will summarize the trajectory of Wild Animal Initiative’s field-building for wild animal welfare science so far, along with patterns and indicators we want to see more of going forward. Beginning with an initial phase focused on establishing credibility and awareness of the field, through a second phase that has placed more emphasis on the distinctiveness and broad priorities of the field, we are now moving into a third phase designed to consolidate effort and encourage more projects to build on each other, enabling the field to make faster progress towards answers to key questions and potential interventions. This post also covers where our research funding has gone over the past few years and some of the field-building milestones we’re seeing.

WAI’s early field-building

Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) launched in early 2019 with the objective of establishing a mainstream scientific field dedicated to the practical study of wild animal welfare (hereafter referred to as “wild animal welfare science” or WAWS). We chose to approach the problem of wild animal suffering through scientific field-building because there were (and remain) many critical questions requiring empirical research before we could know that any wild animal welfare intervention or policy is having a net-positive impact. The study of wild animal welfare requires concepts, methods and skills from both ecology and animal welfare science, but at the time, there were very few scientists studying the welfare of free-living wild animals and there was little crossover between these fields in terms of projects, conferences, or academic programs. Although it would be possible to hire scientists from one of these fields and cross-train them to do research outside of academia (as indeed we do at Wild Animal Initiative on our research team), academic institutions provide a number of efficiencies, such as access to specialized laboratory equipment, field sites, agreements with publishers, and a culture of peer review. By funding academic research, we could take advantage of expertise and infrastructure all over the world, which would also allow us to reach more animals. By helping to coordinate WAWS into a recognized academic field, we could multiply the impact of the research we fund by making its importance clearer to other scientists and decision-makers, and by potentially attracting mainstream funding from universities and agencies to support more WAWS projects.

Our first challenge was establishing awareness and legitimacy of WAWS as a useful, scientifically compelling and tractable area of research. This would attract scientists from adjacent fields to integrate WAWS concepts and methods into their current research, providing experience that would reveal to them and us their level of enthusiasm and aptitude for long-term engagement with the field.

In those first few years, we emphasized areas of overlap with the adjacent fields of ecology, conservation and captive animal welfare science. We asked researchers in these fields to give WAWS a try. For ecologists that meant trying to interpret physiology and behavior in terms of welfare or measuring putative welfare indicators alongside their population and habitat-scale metrics, while for captive animal welfare scientists that meant developing welfare indicators for species with large wild populations or devising new methods to make captive-based welfare assessment methods feasible to apply in the wild. The support of Coefficient Giving, beginning in 2021, allowed us to launch a grants program and enable many more ecologists and captive animal welfare scientists the opportunity to try their hand at wild animal welfare research. This supercharged our field-building work. Beyond the handful of projects we could actually afford to fund, the prospect of receiving a grant incentivized hundreds more researchers to submit proposals engaging with the concepts and methods we wrote about and collaboratively advised them on.

As we started to see repeat grantees and increasingly relevant projects being proposed, we shifted emphasis away from encouraging researchers to ‘try’ WAWS by simply integrating it with their existing research programs, and increasingly emphasized the challenging priority areas and concerns that make the field distinct and will be necessary to inform responsible wild animal welfare interventions. See for example the text of our 2023 call for Seed Grant (<$30k) proposals or our most recent (2025) call for proposals.

As someone who has been with Wild Animal Initiative since the beginning (coming from a PhD in molecular ecology and working part-time on academic outreach at Animal Ethics), if you told me back then that this would be the state of wild animal welfare science in 2026, I would be thrilled. Especially in the past year, we have begun to see important external signals of field-building milestones being reached, including:

• WAI co-organized the 2025 meeting of the UK’s Animal Welfare Research Network, with approximately a third of the conference dedicated to wild animal welfare. We will be doing something similar for the Spanish-language equivalent, RedCIBA, this year, and have been invited to sponsor themed sessions at several other conferences. WAI’s staff researchers have organized workshops and sessions at many other conferences over the years; what is new here is the scale of our involvement and that we are being invited.
• WAI’s research team was invited to curate a special issue of the highly regarded journal, Integrative & Comparative Biology, focused on wild animal welfare. This is a huge opportunity and a field-building milestone that they noticed WAI’s research and thought that wild animal welfare would be a compelling theme for their readership.
• We are seeing more collaborations emerge organically among WAI grantees, and concrete interest in establishing WAWS academic institutions. Within the next six months, we expect to support the launch of the first academic center dedicated to the ecological dimension of wild animal welfare, spearheaded by a cluster of WAI grantees and benefiting from university co-funding. This will complement the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program, which focuses more on policy analysis. Earlier this year, we also made a grant to Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) to develop a standalone wild animal welfare module that would connect students from their animal welfare and conservation MSc programs, as well as create a wild animal welfare scholarship and fund small student research projects in wild animal welfare.

Our theory of change has always been centered on academic field-building, as we think that is the only way to get research done at scale with the credibility that will be required to bring positive policy attention to wild animal welfare (on that note, we’re excited to work with the new policy-focused CWAW!). However, academic field-building is only a means to an end, and ultimately we will only be able to improve wild animal welfare if the field produces quality research on impactful welfare issues.

The foundation of WAWS laid so far

Developing the science necessary to inform responsible wild animal welfare interventions that can meaningfully impact most animals is a huge, long-term endeavor, and most of that impact will be felt only after a sustainable, mission-aligned academic field is established. To that end, we have seen meaningful progress through our grants and internal research towards identifying priorities for further, more concentrated research to focus on. Broadly, we categorize these in terms of identifying factors impacting wild animal welfare, developing tools for assessing wild animal welfare at scale (necessary for monitoring & evaluating interventions), and scoping wild animal welfare interventions. I summarize some highlights from each category here, and you can see the broad sweep of WAI’s external grantmaking allocation in Figure 1 below.

Measuring wild animal welfare

• Does DNA methylation reflect environmental and social adversity?: This project is taking advantage of detailed biographical information assembled over decades of monitoring a single Rocky Mountains marmot population to test whether DNA methylation (a proxy for biological ageing) correlates with an index of early life adversity. This builds on previous work from this team, developing the index, and connects to the importance of juvenile welfare.
• Harnessing machine learning for the non-invasive assessment of wild fish welfare: This project builds on a previous WAI-funded project that developed a judgement bias test for juvenile wild fish by combining a similar approach with machine learning to make it more scalable. We hope that scalable wild animal welfare data collection will eventually lead to a ‘passive’ uptake of wild animal welfare into policy decisions (in addition to the effects of active advocacy) simply by making such data available to decision makers. For example, if someone is performing an environmental impact assessment, they will come across evidence of welfare impacts in their  literature searches alongside evidence of population/conservation impacts.
• Feeling salty: A welfare framework for estuarine fishes: This project aims to identify a specific set of indicators that are both informative and feasible for monitoring the welfare of fish in estuaries. We like that this project is explicitly about making WAWS practicable on the ground and integrating it into environmental impact assessments affecting large numbers of individuals. It’s the kind of project we’ll need to see repeated in many more ecological contexts.
• Environmental drivers of welfare in urban rats: A multimodal field study of micro-habitat conditions and affective behavior: This project, hosted by Basis.ai, will develop a scalable monitoring platform for rat welfare using indicators validated in captivity. With one of the most promising near-term wild animal welfare interventions being rodent fertility control, this is just the kind of thing we’ll need to be able to monitor and optimize our interventions.
• Developing an automated cognitive bias task for wild squirrels: This project will transfer a challenging but widely accepted method of welfare assessment in captivity to a wild rodent in a way that emphasizes scalability and cost-effectiveness.
• Thermal imaging as a non-invasive welfare assessment tool for tracking the impact of environmental stressors across wild animal populations: This project seeks to validate eye temperature as a welfare indicator for wild birds. By using thermal cameras at feeding stations, the method should also be scalable and ideal for monitoring the impact of interventions based around fixed locations, like supplemental feeding or contraceptive bait stations.
• Developing an approach for assessing the welfare of wild birds through the use of bioacoustics analysis and Assessing animal welfare from bioacoustic monitoring in red-billed choughs: These two similar projects, funded at the same time, are both developing passive acoustic monitoring to study wild bird welfare. This approach could also be automated and scaled at relatively low cost, and used alongside similar approaches, like thermal imaging.
• Remote welfare assessment in wildlife using stand-off Raman spectroscopy: This project seeks to develop a method for measuring cortisol levels in the hair of wild mammals remotely, using Raman spectroscopy. Although cortisol is not the strongest welfare indicator by itself, the prospect of measuring it without even touching an animal provides great potential for large-scale automated welfare monitoring in combination with things like camera traps, thermal imaging and bioacoustics.
• Developing, testing and validating indicators of wild insect welfare: This project will attempt to validate a suite of field-accessible welfare indicators for three common yet disparate insect species. Meghan Barrett of the Insect Welfare Research Society is also a collaborator.

Understanding factors affecting welfare

• Stranding: a blessing or a curse? Testing assumptions of fish welfare during habitat fragmentation: This project is investigating what happens to welfare when drought separates fish populations into isolated and shrinking lakes. It is also a fellowship for a mission-aligned PhD student.
• Evaluating wild animal welfare in landscapes of fear at urban-wildland interfaces: This project is investigating potential welfare impact of lizards’ fear response to suburban dangers, such as vehicles and cats. It is also a fellowship for a mission-aligned postdoc, and is investigating DNA methylation as a potential welfare indicator.
• Parasites in the city: How is the impact of parasites on wild animal welfare affected by urbanization?: This project will evaluate the welfare impact of parasitic infections on grey squirrels and relate it to their age and other demographic factors in a QALY-like framework (‘welfare expectancy’).

Welfare interventions

• Towards welfare-centered prescribed fire: With climate change increasing wildfire risk globally, there is increasing emphasis on forestry tactics such as controlled burns. This project will study how bush rats react to controlled burns and use that information to create welfare-focused guidelines that minimize impacts on wild rodent welfare. These guidelines could also help reduce the wild animal suffering caused by unplanned/naturogenic wildfires.

• Does diet mediate effects of sublethal parasitic infections on host welfare?: This project is primarily studying the impact of intestinal nematode parasites on wild mouse welfare and how that effect interacts with other risk factors. However, because it takes an experimental approach by deworming some of the mice in expectation of seeing a positive welfare impact, it could also be considered a trial of a wild animal welfare intervention.

   

Figure 1: How WAI’s grantmaking has broken out across taxa (note that rodents are distinguished as a priority group from non-rodent mammals), project types, and welfare factor categories since our 2023 calls for proposals (which is when our metrics became more consistent). It reflects the consequences of some meaningful prioritization decisions on our part: 1) lots of funding to rodent projects; 2) significant funding to invertebrate projects and almost all of it to projects whose primary purpose is "measuring welfare" (because that remains the primary barrier to understanding and improving invertebrate welfare, even more than with other taxa); 3) generally diversified funding across taxa and welfare factors. These reflect our strategy of building and maintaining a broad field that is working towards a better world for all animals, while nudging its priorities towards the most numerous animals and the most important and tractable causes of suffering. Note that for projects that considered welfare factors from multiple categories, the budget was divided equally across those categories.

What we haven’t seen enough of

We are happy with the foundation of wild animal welfare research we’ve seeded over the past few years, and excited to see those projects’ results. However, as I alluded to earlier, most of our early grantmaking took a big-tent, experimental approach, emphasizing giving a shot to scientists who were new to the field (which was almost everyone at the beginning) and initiating projects on diverse species using diverse methods. There is necessarily a trade-off, and that brings me to the topic of what we haven’t optimized for up to this point but need to see more of going forward. We haven’t seen enough projects building on each other. I mentioned one standout example above, which is the project using machine learning to evaluate attention bias in wild fish. However, this is one of a handful of exceptions.

The long timescale of academic research is probably a huge factor. From the point when we fund a project, it usually takes months to start; sometimes because the principal investigator must recruit a PhD student or postdoc, or permits must be obtained. Then, the pace of many projects is limited by field seasons. Once the data is collected, the pace of analysis and writing is largely in the hands of the researchers, but it is challenging, often requiring coordination of a whole team of researchers who may have other projects or teaching responsibilities. Then, there’s the academic publishing process, which is genuinely inefficient (to put it mildly). The net result of this is that most of the projects WAI has funded have not published their results yet, and the ones that have are mostly from the earliest funding rounds, when we funded projects on the widest variety of themes and methods. Funding wide early was a strategic choice, since our first priority was introducing new people to the field and demonstrating its scope and relevance across many disciplines. However, all this means that there has been little opportunity for new grant applicants to build on or even learn about previous WAI-funded research unless they already collaborate with the relevant grantees. Moreover, each year we’ve received a larger share of projects focusing on abundant/neglected taxa and more important causes of suffering, and we’ve generally prioritized those over continuing to fund less impactful research directions. We’re really pleased to be seeing that shift and think we’ve taken the right approach so far, but we are approaching a pivot point. Ultimately, it is crucial for projects to build on each other and develop into deep research programs because actually improving wild animal welfare is such a complex, multi-step challenge.

The next phase of WAI’s strategy

If our initial priority of establishing mainstream acceptance of WAWS was phase 1 of WAI’s strategy (~2019-2023), and phase 2 involved emphasizing the distinctiveness of the field by leaning more into our priority themes while still focusing on growing the field (~2023-26), we are now entering a third phase. To accelerate progress improving wild animal welfare by building on this initial foundation of research initiatives, and to encourage long-term commitment to WAWS by reinvesting in the researchers who have demonstrated enthusiasm and aptitude for WAWS, the next phase of WAI’s strategy will emphasize the development of research programs over individual projects, and developing institutions through networks of researchers.

We have lots of plans and changes in store to address those objectives. I won’t share anything here that we aren’t prepared to share with the scientists in our network, but I can describe some of the most important changes that will be coming to our grants program when our next call for proposals launches this fall. Currently, we offer three main types of research grants that are primarily distinguished by their budget limits and competitiveness. We are now introducing all-new grant types, with much more specific purposes. These grant types will be offered simultaneously, but are designed to lead from one type to the next for any given research program or study system:

• The first stage will be a Seed Grant (<$30k), which are for observational or pilot studies intended to identify candidate welfare indicators that could be subjected to a more rigorous validation experiment. For example, I have rescued dozens of injured garden snails, and I’ve noticed a few things that might be relevant to welfare: the posture and rigidity of their eye stalks seems to vary depending on the circumstances, and how much they retract their body into their shells when they sleep seems to vary among individuals. Those hypotheses aren’t developed or grounded enough to warrant a validation experiment, but with a Seed Grant I could quantify those snail behaviors alongside welfare-relevant conditions (such as competition or parasite load) to look for statistical associations as a first step. (Incidentally, we recently funded a welfare indicator validation project for snails!)
• For better-understood taxa and contexts, a Seed Grant may not be necessary and a researcher can proceed directly to the first major grant type, a Validation Grant (<$200k). These projects will be entirely focused on testing the validity of potential welfare indicators through a structured process originally proposed by Heather Browning and applied by WAI’s Research Manager Michaël Beaulieu and others (e.g. Beaulieu 2024). The validation process is absolutely essential for truly understanding wild animal welfare because it confirms that we are actually assessing welfare. However, it is highly rigorous, and we’ve found that many grant applicants understandably want to skip ahead to the more interesting and motivating questions. That’s why we’re introducing a specific grant type dedicated to this kind of project.
• We are also tightening our requirements for projects’ welfare assessment frameworks, which will give grantees who successfully deliver on a validation project a distinct advantage if they subsequently propose to address those more interesting questions via the next grant type, a Welfare Ecology Grant (<$200k). These grants will focus on assessing how wild animal welfare is affected by ecological factors, such as resource availability, disease, etc., within particular ecosystems. The objective of these grants is to gradually build up a picture of the causal network of factors so that interventions or policies can eventually be devised to improve wild animal welfare.
• Intervention Grants will support that final step, and will debut next year, with our 2027 call for proposals. These projects will run field trials of interventions based on justified hypotheses and monitoring and evaluation tools of the sort developed through Validation Grants and Welfare Ecology Grants. Currently, we do not have these pieces in place for any wild animal welfare intervention, although we have funded projects working towards a foundation for testing a few potential interventions, including rodent fertility control and bird feeding. Between now and the launch of Intervention Grants, WAI’s research team will also be developing a new internal research agenda for 2027-29 by working backwards from potential wild animal welfare interventions to identify recurring research questions that would need to be answered in order to recommend for or against multiple specific interventions. Our internal research agenda will focus on broad conceptual or methodological questions that emerge, but other lessons from this process will inform what we ask of future Intervention Grant applicants.

Figure 2: The progression path through WAI grant types. A grant applicant seeking to break ground on a new research program would first apply for a Seed Grant if their focal species and the welfare challenges they face are poorly understood. If the basic biology of the species is reasonably well understood, but it has not been studied in welfare terms in the wild, they may apply directly for a Validation Grant. If the applicant is already an experienced wild animal welfare scientist (based on publication record) and there are validated indicators for the proposed focal species (or close relatives), they may apply directly for a Welfare Ecology Grant. We expect that it will take multiple Welfare Ecology Grant projects (by the same or different teams) for most research programs to mature to the point where they can proceed to an Intervention Grant.

We will also be experimenting with ways to hasten the handover of new knowledge between projects, such as requiring grantees to commit to a timeline for publication (or at least pre-print sharing) and facilitating more small-scale meet-ups for researchers working on related problems (like this one organized by WAI grantees working on applying cognitive bias tests to wild animals). Investing in WAWS institutions, particularly research centers, could also help accelerate research feedback loops, since co-located wild animal welfare scientists should be relatively up-to-date with each other’s findings.

Conclusion

WAI’s first 7 years of field-building for wild animal welfare science has laid the foundations of a recognized and growing field (albeit one still almost fully dependent on WAI for funding). We have prioritized establishing awareness and legitimacy for the field, publishing research that articulates key concepts of the field, and awarding research grants that showcase the scope and priorities of the field while giving scientists from adjacent fields an opportunity to incorporate wild animal welfare into their personal research programs. A trade-off of this approach is that research has been less concentrated towards any single breakthrough or intervention. However, we are already seeing this pay off in terms of a broad base of interest and support for wild animal welfare science. Our grants have seeded many compelling avenues for further development, and we think the field has reached a stage where WAI-funded research effort can become more consolidated into projects that build on one another. This is a tactical evolution to help ensure the coordination-related benefits of an academic field are actually realized in terms of research towards the most pressing and action-relevant questions.