Welfare biology is a new academic discipline that applies welfare science to wild animals at population and ecosystem scale, providing frameworks for thinking about aggregate wild animal suffering.
Welfare biology forces a confrontation with uncomfortable mathematics. Wild animals enormously outnumber farmed animals - the oceans alone contain trillions of fish. If these animals have welfare-relevant experiences, their aggregate suffering from predation, disease, starvation, and parasitism dwarfs all human-caused animal welfare harm combined. Welfare biology does not immediately suggest interventions - ecological systems are complex and human interventions often cause more harm than they prevent. But it provides a framework for thinking rigorously about the scale of wild animal suffering and where limited interventions might genuinely improve outcomes without ecological disruption.