In case it’s useful: Wild animal suffering video course
Animal_Ethics
Karma: 635
Launching AI & Animals: A Documentary
Rewilding in the United Kingdom
Seantience: a documentary exploring the capacity to feel of aquatic animals
New Documentary on AI and Animals
Animal Ethics: Marginal Funding Request for 2026 Outreach on Neglected Animal Advocacy Topics
Why we ignore the suffering of wild animals: Understanding our biases
Animal Ethics website now in Arabic
Introducing Senti—Animal Ethics AI Assistant
Scope insensitivity: failing to appreciate the numbers of those who need our help
Strategic considerations for effective wild animal suffering work
Perspectives on animal advocacy in China
Hi, yes there is a difference between creating new frameworks, and just adopting frameworks to different species in parallel. You probably have in mind the establishment of welfare biology as a new field. What happens in that case is that the study of the circumstances affecting the welfare of wild animals requires learning many things about their environment, due to which cross-disciplinary work intersecting animal welfare science and ecology is needed, which is not the case with domesticated animals.
You’re probably right with regards to sources of funding for cognitive ethology, and that’s also the case for animal welfare science.
What you say about little attention being paid to invertebrates is also true.Thanks for your comment!
A new study looks at how scientific fields have formed
Animal Ethics work in 2020
Great questions! The cost of eDNA sampling will depend on the situation and environment to some extent. Its use in water is quite well developed. There is where we currently see the most research and cost comparisons. For instance, from 2017 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03632415.2017.1276329) “the total effort expended to analyze 36 eDNA samples was approximately 6.8 person-hours. At an hourly pay rate of $22.51/h, the labor cost associated with analyzing our samples was $153. Cost of screening the samples with ddPCR was $4.02 per sample (Nathan et al. 2014) plus the cost of DNA extraction at $8.49 per sample. Therefore, the overall cost of analyzing our 36 eDNA samples and six control samples was $525 (materials) + $153 (labor) = $678.”
This labor costs are compared to electro-fishing (two forms: single-pass and triple-pass): “Total effort, adjusted for crew size, to sample the full length of the 10 100-m electrofishing reaches was 90 person-hours with triple-pass electrofishing and 30 person-hours with single-pass electrofishing. Therefore, the total cost in labor to sample the full length of the 10 sample reaches was $2,026 with triple-pass electrofishing and $676 with single-pass electrofishing.” In this electro-fishing comparison, the cost of materials was not included.
We have great hope that the methodologies being used in farmed animal systems can be adapted. Certainly fishes in the wild could already benefit. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327302106_Predicting_parasite_outbreaks_in_fish_farms_through_environmental_DNA_eDNA)
We are happy to answer any more questions you have!
Yes, and we are also planning to switch to Claude Haiku (a faster model for generating responses).