Wild animal welfare suffers from a lack of dedicated infrastructure compared to companion and farm animal welfare. Building systemic support for wild animal welfare is an urgent need.
The scope of wild animal welfare is staggering: billions of wild vertebrates experience injury, disease, starvation, and predation every day, with minimal systematic human intervention. The mismatch between the scale of wild animal suffering and the resources dedicated to addressing it reflects historical priorities rather than ethical reasoning. Building wild animal welfare infrastructure - research capacity, policy frameworks, rehabilitation networks, and public education - is one of the most high-leverage opportunities in animal welfare. Early investment in this field may eventually benefit billions of individual animals.