Wild animals experience enormous amounts of suffering through predation, disease, parasitism, and starvation. The ethics and practicality of human intervention to reduce wild animal suffering is an emerging and contested field.
Wild animal suffering is quantitatively enormous. The majority of animals born in the wild die young, often painfully, from predation, starvation, disease, or environmental extremes. The question of whether and how humans should intervene to reduce this suffering is genuinely difficult — interventions can have unintended ecological consequences, and the scale dwarfs any plausible human response. However, dismissing wild animal suffering as "natural" and therefore not warranting moral concern is logically inconsistent with caring about domesticated animal welfare. Tractable interventions — wildlife contraception, disease vaccination, targeted supplemental feeding — demonstrate that reducing wild animal suffering is sometimes practically achievable.