I have big concerns about this making development more difficult by adding further evaluation and reporting requirements to the construction of new housing and infrastructure.
I have visions of a future in which NIMBYs at council meetings wave WILD documentation to oppose new apartment buildings and train lines so as not to bother the local pigeon population.
A Project of the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program
Thanks to a generous grant from the New York Community Trust, the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is thrilled to announce a first-of-its-kind project at the science-policy nexus: the Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab.
The WILD Lab is an applied research and outreach initiative dedicated to advancing the welfare of wild animals in urban environments by aiming to understand how urban infrastructure affects wild animals, and how governments and communities can respond.
Our work will involve interdisciplinary research and cross-sectoral collaboration with four main areas of focus:
The lab’s principal investigator will be WAWP co-director Jeff Sebo. Mal Graham will serve as science coordinator, Adalene Minelli as policy coordinator, and Audrey Becker as lab administrator. This core team will be joined by many additional collaborators both internal and external to NYU.
Key institutional partners will include the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection (NYU Arts & Science), the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law (NYU Law), the Office of Sustainability (NYU), and Wild Animal Initiative, among many others.
You can visit our website to learn more about the project.
Our team can be reached by email at [email protected].
Happy to see development and funding in this field.
I would flag the obvious issue that a very small proportion of wild animals live in cities, given that cities take up a small proportion of the world. But I do know that there have been investigation into rats, which do exist in great numbers in cities.
The website for this project shows a fox - but I presume that this was chosen because it's a sympathetic animal - not because foxes in cities represent a great deal of suffering.
I understand that tradeoffs need to be made to work with different funding sources and circumstances. But I'm of course curious what the broader story is here.
Nice point, Ozzie. I think wild animal welfare interventions would have to target aquatic or invertebrate animals in order to be as cost-effective as the best invertebrate welfare interventions. So I would like to have a clearer picture of how helping a few birds and mammals in urban areas leads to that.
I was just looking into Wild Animal Initiative's 2024 report, and it includes a cost-effectiveness analysis of "A government program to vaccinate raccoons against rabies" (pp. 28 to 31). They estimated the program prevented 0.0641 deaths/$ (= 1/15.6). Wild raccoons live for about 5 years. If each deaths from rabies prevented resulted in 2.5 additional raccoon-years (= 5/2), the program created 0.160 raccoon-years/$ (= 0.0641*2.5). Assuming 0.258 QALYs/raccoon-year (= 0.5*0.515), which is 50 % of Rethink Priorities' (RP's) median welfare range of pigs, the cost-effectiveness would be 0.0413 QALY/$ (= 0.160*0.258), which is 0.00646 % (= 0.0413/639) of my estimate for the past cost-effectiveness of the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP). I guess advocating for the government to spend money on such a vaccination program could be 10 times as cost-effective as funding the program itself[1], which would be 0.0646 % (= 6.46*10^-5*10) as cost-effective as SWP has been. @mal_graham🔸, you may be interested in this quick analysis.
I have ignored above the indirect effects of the vaccination program. I think including would play in favour of SWP. This mainly advocates for electrically stunning shrimp before slaughter via the Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI), which has minimal effects on non-target animals, whereas increasing raccoon-years will tend to decrease the population of the animals they eat. I do not know whether this is good or bad, but I think it may well be the driver of the overall effect.
The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) estimated donating 1 $ to Giving What We Can results in an increase of 13 $ in donations to organisations as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.