Wild animals vastly outnumber domesticated animals — and the welfare challenges they face from predation, disease, parasitism, and starvation are enormous in scope.
Wild animal welfare is simultaneously the largest and least addressed area of welfare ethics. The sheer number of wild animals and the pervasiveness of natural suffering — predation, disease, starvation — dwarf all human-caused animal welfare problems by number of individuals affected. However, interventions in wild animal welfare are complex: they involve ecological consequences that must be carefully managed, and they raise philosophical questions about the extent of our obligation to improve suffering that we did not cause. Modest, scientifically grounded interventions — wildlife vaccination, habitat restoration, rehabilitation — represent the current frontier of wild animal welfare practice.