Episode Details

Cross-posted from Good Structures.

COI note: This piece touches on some aspects of Wild Animal Initiative's work, and why I am excited about it. I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative, and while I no longer have any affiliation, my spouse works there.

Doing wild animal welfare at scale, in a way we are confident is robustly good, is currently not possible. The primary bottleneck is scientific: we don't have the knowledge to predict what our interventions will do, or to measure whether they work. For this reason, the wild animal welfare community has heavily focused on scientific field building. To get the science to a point to make wild animal welfare viable, we need enough motivated people working on it.

This is a long theory of change, and it is sometimes met with skepticism by people who want to help animals sooner. Occasionally, calls go out for action and intervention in the wild animal welfare space. But, as has been pointed out, I'm not sure the alternative, where we primarily focus on interventions, is actually viable. Wild animal welfare advocates are acutely aware we can't escape the effects of our interventions on non-target animals, and the uncertainty of our [...]

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Outline:

(04:04) The three pillars

(04:07) 1. Useful welfare measures

(08:01) 2. Remote monitoring

(13:18) 3. Good ecological modeling

(17:15) These things will be expensive to achieve, but are worth paying for

(20:38) Some of this work will be exciting to non-animal welfare scientists

(22:52) Long theories of change and field building

(24:39) Why have people opposed field building?

(26:50) So build the field

(28:27) Acknowledgements

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First published:
April 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7RWptAh7BgBa6f7az/three-necessary-pillars-for-wild-animal-welfare-at-scale-and

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.