Welfare biology — the systematic study of wild animal welfare and how to improve it — is emerging as an academic field addressing the vast domain of non-farmed animal suffering.
Welfare biology confronts the uncomfortable arithmetic of animal welfare: the scale of wild animal suffering from disease, predation, starvation, and natural population dynamics almost certainly exceeds the combined suffering of all farmed and companion animals. Yet the vast majority of animal welfare attention focuses on the smaller domain of human-caused animal suffering. Welfare biology does not argue for eliminating predation or managing all wild suffering — such interventions are neither practical nor clearly positive in complex ecosystems. But it does argue for recognizing wild animal welfare as morally relevant, investing in research on wild animal suffering and how it might be reduced where interventions are feasible, and including wild animal welfare in the scope of animal ethics.