Wild animals regularly experience injuries and disease that cause pain. Understanding field management options for wild animal pain raises important ethical questions about intervention.
Wild animal pain sits at the frontier of welfare ethics. The non-intervention default reflects practical constraints but not an absence of welfare concern. For wild animals that can be captured and treated, pain management is increasingly standard. For those that cannot, the ethical question of whether suffering that cannot be alleviated should influence policy decisions about its causes deserves serious attention from welfare scientists and ethicists.