Wild Animal Suffering and Scale | Animal Welfare Hub

Wild animal suffering from predation, parasitism, disease, and starvation occurs at a scale that dwarfs farmed animal suffering numerically, raising profound questions for those committed to animal welfare.

Key Facts

Wild animal populations experience very high juvenile mortality — a mayfly produces thousands of offspring of which almost none survive to adulthood.
r-selected species including insects, fish, and many small mammals experience life expectancy measured in days to weeks.
Predation, parasitism, starvation, and disease cause deaths that involve significant suffering in billions of wild animals daily.
The philosopher Oscar Horta estimated that wild animal suffering likely exceeds farmed animal suffering by many orders of magnitude.
Interventions including wildlife vaccination, fertility control, and habitat management can reduce some sources of wild animal suffering.

Welfare Considerations

Wild animal suffering is the elephant in the room of animal welfare ethics — a source of suffering that dwarfs human-caused animal suffering in scale yet receives minimal attention and resources. Most animal welfare organizations focus on human-caused harms, which are more tractable and more morally clear-cut. But a genuinely animal-welfare-oriented framework requires at least acknowledging the scale of natural suffering and engaging with the difficult question of what, if anything, can and should be done about it.

What You Can Do

Engage with the philosophical and scientific literature on wild animal suffering through organizations including Wild Animal Initiative.
Support research into interventions that reduce specific preventable sources of wild animal suffering such as infectious disease.
Advocate for incorporation of wild animal welfare into conservation planning and environmental impact assessment.
Contribute to organizations like Wild Animal Initiative that fund research into wild animal welfare at scale.