Wild Animal Pain and the Challenge of Field Assessment

Assessing pain in wild animals in natural settings presents unique scientific and practical challenges that make wildlife welfare one of the most difficult domains in applied animal welfare science.

Key Facts

Wild animals typically hide pain and injury to avoid appearing vulnerable to predators
Behavioral changes associated with pain — reduced mobility, altered posture, social withdrawal — are observable but require knowledge of normal species behavior to interpret
Remote sensing technologies are beginning to enable non-invasive behavioral assessment at scale
Grimace scale development for wild species is an emerging field with studies on deer, foxes, and other species
The scale of wild animal suffering from injury and disease almost certainly exceeds all farmed animal suffering combined

Welfare Considerations

Wild animal pain represents perhaps the largest unaddressed domain in animal welfare. The combination of behavioral concealment of injury, the scale of wild animal populations, and the difficulty of observing individual animals in natural settings means that wild animal suffering from injury, disease, and the natural processes of aging and death is vast in scale but largely invisible. This does not make it unimportant — it may represent the majority of all animal suffering occurring on Earth. Developing tools for non-invasive assessment of wild animal welfare states is one of the most important frontiers in welfare science, even if the interventions available to reduce this suffering remain limited.

What You Can Do

Support research into non-invasive wild animal pain and welfare assessment methods
Donate to wildlife veterinary programs treating injured wild animals when they are accessible
Advocate for wildlife welfare to be considered in land management and conservation planning
Support the emerging field of welfare biology that systematically addresses non-farmed animal suffering