Executive summary: In 2024, Wild Animal Initiative and its grantees significantly expanded the body of peer-reviewed research on wild animal welfare, with a focus on improving welfare measurement tools, identifying potential interventions like fertility control, and strengthening interdisciplinary connections—demonstrating both growing momentum in the field and a strategic effort to fill critical knowledge gaps.
Key points:
Wild Animal Initiative and its grantees published more research papers in 2024 than in the previous five years combined, reflecting increasing research capacity and output.
The organization prioritizes topics that fill major knowledge gaps, are underexplored, or align well with its team’s expertise—such as welfare metrics, near-term interventions, and interdisciplinary bridges.
Research by WAI staff emphasized the importance of incorporating welfare considerations into comparative cognition studies, explored oxidative stress as a general welfare indicator, evaluated the welfare benefits of wildlife contraception, and examined the potential of biologging tools for welfare science.
Grantee-led studies introduced novel, field-replicable methods for assessing welfare-related judgment bias in wild fish and investigated the gut microbiome as a promising non-invasive welfare biomarker.
Across studies, a shared emphasis was placed on using or developing non-invasive, scalable tools to assess animal welfare in wild settings, aiming to enable future interventions that are both effective and ethically informed.
The post showcases the early fruits of Wild Animal Initiative’s dual-track strategy—supporting external researchers via grants while publishing targeted in-house research to strategically build the field.
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Executive summary: In 2024, Wild Animal Initiative and its grantees significantly expanded the body of peer-reviewed research on wild animal welfare, with a focus on improving welfare measurement tools, identifying potential interventions like fertility control, and strengthening interdisciplinary connections—demonstrating both growing momentum in the field and a strategic effort to fill critical knowledge gaps.
Key points:
Wild Animal Initiative and its grantees published more research papers in 2024 than in the previous five years combined, reflecting increasing research capacity and output.
The organization prioritizes topics that fill major knowledge gaps, are underexplored, or align well with its team’s expertise—such as welfare metrics, near-term interventions, and interdisciplinary bridges.
Research by WAI staff emphasized the importance of incorporating welfare considerations into comparative cognition studies, explored oxidative stress as a general welfare indicator, evaluated the welfare benefits of wildlife contraception, and examined the potential of biologging tools for welfare science.
Grantee-led studies introduced novel, field-replicable methods for assessing welfare-related judgment bias in wild fish and investigated the gut microbiome as a promising non-invasive welfare biomarker.
Across studies, a shared emphasis was placed on using or developing non-invasive, scalable tools to assess animal welfare in wild settings, aiming to enable future interventions that are both effective and ethically informed.
The post showcases the early fruits of Wild Animal Initiative’s dual-track strategy—supporting external researchers via grants while publishing targeted in-house research to strategically build the field.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.