Given the number of wild animals that exist, interventions to improve their welfare could have greater expected value than interventions on behalf of other groups. Yet, wild animals receive only a small share of resources earmarked for animal welfare causes. This report explores how different risk aversion frameworks might help increase advocates’ reasoning transparency.

The massive scale of invasive (e.g., non-native) Lymantria dispar dispar (spongy moth) outbreaks represents an unappreciated wild animal welfare issue.

This is a linkpost for a preprint paper submitted for peer review. The report explains how vaccine baits can be used to reduce the costs of dog vaccination campaigns, which are the key to controlling rabies amongst humans.

This post is the third installment in the Rodenticide Reduction sequence. This report describes and ranks interventions to reduce rodenticide use in the U.S. according to their expected impact, neglectedness, and tractability.

This post is the second installment in the Rodenticide Reduction sequence. This report explores the reasons why rodenticides are used, under what circumstances they could be replaced, and whether they are replaceable with currently available alternatives.

This report explores using AI to increase the effectiveness of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) mitigations in order to benefit wild animal welfare (WAW). Two concrete examples are providing more funding, research, and direct work into reducing fatalities due to 1) collisions between bats and wind turbines, and 2) culling crop-raiding starlings. The report aims merely to raise awareness of this topic and introduce the idea for discussion, but does not yet strongly suggest it is a cost-effective intervention on par with other interventions.

This report is a postscript to "The relative Importance of the severity and duration of pain,” and addresses whether the order of negative and positive experiences matter. For example, is pain worse if it occurs at the end of an individual’s life?

How should effective altruists decide whether to prioritize interventions that alleviate severe but relatively brief suffering or instead those that alleviate longer-lasting but less severe suffering? When one pain is longer-lasting but less intense than a second pain, the most straightforward way to compare how much disutility they cause is to multiply how much longer by how much less severe the first pain is than the second pain. This report investigates whether this mathematical approach is sufficient for making cause prioritization decisions, requires some amendments, or is fundamentally flawed.

In this text, Saulius Šimčikas analyzed whether animal advocates should work on decreasing aquatic noise as it potentially stresses wild fish. His tentative conclusion is that most likely, ocean noise interventions wouldn’t be cost-effective compared to current farmed animal interventions, although there is some small chance that it’s more cost-effective than them.

This paper describes the past and current rodent pest control landscape with a particular focus on the harms of rodenticidal poisons and the possibilities for rodent birth control as a cruelty-minimizing alternative. Because rodent birth control is most available in the United States, the focus of this paper is primarily on the U.S.

This article describes how various types and features of vocalizations could act as welfare metrics for wild animals and how a remote acoustic sensing network could be used to collect this type of data non-invasively. Animal vocalizations vary with emotional state (due to physiological changes). Certain types of vocalizations are only produced in certain situations (e.g. alarm calls), which could give us information about the lives of wild animals. Vocalizations can be recorded from the wild remotely, using microphones placed in the field. Machine learning techniques could be applied to recognize the species and analyze welfare-indicating features in the vocalizations, or recognize what type of call it is. This may help indicate the welfare status of whole groups of populations of wild animals. Studying affective vocalizations could give insight into animal welfare in many different contexts, not just remote sensing.

Previously published estimates of the number of birds and mammals killed by owned cats are probably too large by over one billion animals. We estimated a median of 640 million animals killed in both the US and Canada, whereas it has been suggested that a median of 1933 million animals are killed in the US alone. Our estimates suggest that interventions aimed at reducing owned cat predation will therefore directly affect a smaller number of wild animals (~830 animals per $1000) than previously suggested (~5500 animals per $1000)

This article contains a list of research organizations, newsletters, research libraries, personal blogs, conferences, podcasts, funds, notable written works and other links associated with Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) movement. The list is biased because I only included resources that I know of.

Life history classification will hide some significant differences in the lives of wild animals. Not all species within a given classification possess all of the traits associated with that group even across all years or all locations. Therefore, when making moral decisions, one also has to consider how average quality of life should be determined in the face of large variance. Among insect herbivores, some lifespans are relatively long, some modes of death are very quick, and some small-bodied herbivores may lead lives characterized by ample food resources. Although determining the affective states of wild animals from this data is impossible, it seems quite likely that the majority individuals in some subgroups, such as those sheltered from both the elements and predation by feeding from within plant tissues, lead very high quality lives. Knowing a group of organisms produce many offspring, have high mortality rates, small body size and are short-lived is not sufficient to determine that their lives are a net negative (or positive)

Understanding the life history of animals is important for understanding wild animal welfare, but has been understudied by animal welfare advocates. In particular, life history generalizations have been used to claim that the lives of most wild animals are net negative. However, there are several methods of life history classification in use in ecology and evolutionary biology. The theoretical foundations for r-K selection referred by some advocates have been discredited, and in addition some large species groups cannot be placed on this continuum. However, a related form of this classification, fast-slow is still in use in the sciences.

Fish stocking is the practice of raising fish in hatcheries and releasing them into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. 35-150 billion finfish are stocked every year. Fish are stocked to: increase the catch in commercial fisheries (probably tens of billions of stocked fish annually), increase the catch in recreational/sport fisheries (billions of stocked fish annually), and restore a population of threatened or endangered species (the number of stocked fish seems to be lower).