Episode Details
Back to Episodes“WAI is starting Phase 3 of field-building for wild animal welfare science” by Luke Hecht
Description
Summary
This post will summarize the trajectory of Wild Animal Initiative's field-building for wild animal welfare science so far, along with patterns and indicators we want to see more of going forward. Beginning with an initial phase focused on establishing credibility and awareness of the field, through a second phase that has placed more emphasis on the distinctiveness and broad priorities of the field, we are now moving into a third phase designed to consolidate effort and encourage more projects to build on each other, enabling the field make faster progress towards answers to key questions and potential interventions. This post also covers where our research funding has gone over the past few years and some of the field-building milestones we’re seeing.
WAI's early field-building
Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) launched in early 2019 with the objective of establishing a mainstream scientific field dedicated to the practical study of wild animal welfare (hereafter referred to as “wild animal welfare science” or WAWS). We chose to approach the problem of wild animal suffering through scientific field-building because there were (and remain) many critical questions requiring empirical research before we could know that any wild animal welfare intervention or policy is having [...]
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Outline:
(00:12) Summary
(00:55) WAI's early field-building
(07:13) The foundation of WAWS laid so far
(08:08) Measuring wild animal welfare
(12:19) Understanding factors affecting welfare
(13:26) Welfare interventions
(15:41) What we haven't seen enough of
(18:18) The next phase of WAI's strategy
(24:48) Conclusion
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First published:
August 19th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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