Wild animal suffering research is an emerging field examining how disease, predation, starvation and parasitism affect billions of wild animals, with implications for potential interventions.
Wild animal welfare science confronts the uncomfortable reality that nature is not inherently kind. Most wild animals live short lives marked by hunger, parasite burden, disease, and violent death. The scale of potential suffering dwarfs that caused by human agriculture by many orders of magnitude. This field is developing both empirical methods for measuring wild animal welfare and ethical frameworks for thinking about human obligations to wild animals - a frontier that will shape animal ethics for decades.