Wild animals experience disease, starvation, predation, parasitism, and extreme weather routinely. Some welfare advocates argue that natural suffering deserves moral consideration alongside human-caused harms.
The welfare of wild animals in nature — independent of human action — is an emerging area of moral consideration. The scale of natural suffering is enormous: billions of small mammals and birds die from starvation, disease, and predation each year. While direct intervention in natural processes is ethically complex and practically difficult, acknowledging that wild animal lives involve real welfare experiences changes how we think about our obligations to the natural world.