Wild animal welfare is an emerging field that expands moral consideration to animals in natural environments, with developing approaches for intervention and monitoring.
Wild animals experience vast amounts of suffering from disease, predation, parasites, and starvation that human intervention cannot and arguably should not fully prevent. However, some harms are clearly human-caused and therefore appropriate targets for welfare intervention: road mortality, pollution, habitat destruction, and disease from human land use. The wild animal welfare field is developing frameworks for deciding when and how to intervene based on both welfare outcomes and ecological effects. The scale of wild animal welfare consideration extends to billions of animals across every ecosystem, making it one of the most important moral challenges of the coming decades.