Wild animal suffering from disease, predation, parasites, and starvation is enormous - the ethics and practicalities of wild animal welfare intervention are a frontier welfare topic.
Wild animal suffering challenges conventional conservation thinking which focuses on populations and species rather than individual welfare. From an individual welfare perspective, the suffering of prey animals during predation, of juvenile animals dying from starvation, or of wild animals suffering from parasitic disease is morally significant. The emerging field of wild animal welfare seeks practical, ecologically sound interventions that reduce individual suffering without undermining ecosystem function. This is genuinely hard - ecosystem interventions have unpredictable consequences - but dismissing wild animal welfare entirely seems ethically untenable given the scale of suffering involved.