Wild Animal Suffering...and why it matters

We need better ways to help wild animals, and that starts with research. Scientists are working to understand how animals experience life in the wild, what causes them the most suffering, and which interventions actually work.

This includes studying how to measure animal wellbeing in the wild, population dynamics, and ecosystem impacts. As researchers learn more about wild animal welfare, they can guide policymakers and wildlife managers toward practices that truly help animals rather than just preserving ecosystems.

Right now, scientists are figuring out how to implement many of the more direct interventions discussed below, such as developing outreach strategies to help more people understand why wild animal welfare matters.

Vaccination programs have already saved millions of wild animals from painful deaths.

Oral rabies vaccination shows exactly what's possible. Europe eliminated 99% of rabies in foxes since the 1980s by dropping vaccine-filled baits from aircraft. North America created massive rabies-free zones for raccoons, preventing thousands of deaths from a disease that attacks the nervous system and causes weeks of suffering.

The same approach works for other diseases. Prairie dogs get vaccinated against plague before it wipes out entire colonies. Wild birds are protected from flu viruses that cause painful respiratory infections and, ultimately, death. Each program requires custom vaccine formulations with strategic delivery mechanisms and careful monitoring to track how well they're working.

Policy change means pushing for laws that protect wild animals from human-caused harm and, where possible, reduce natural suffering too. This includes stopping harmful practices such as wild animal trafficking, overhunting, or exploitation for entertainment. It can also mean helping reduce suffering due to natural harms such as natural disasters, disease, or starvation.

Policy change can also mean adding animal welfare to government decision-making processes. Sometimes policy change doesn't help animals immediately, but it can increase funding for wild animal welfare research and set the stage for bigger changes later.

This work often means teaming up with conservationists, scientists, and lawmakers. It's complex because traditional conservation can help some animals while harming others, but the goal is creating evidence-based policies that actually reduce suffering.

Raising awareness is key to building the cultural and political support that makes all other solutions possible. This means writing articles and op-eds, creating content, hosting university events, and having conversations that help people understand wild animal welfare.

These efforts help normalize caring about wild animals, attract new researchers and funders, and create the cultural foundation needed for direct interventions.

Wild animals live everywhere, not just in remote wilderness. Many live in cities, villages, and farmland where both human activities and natural factors harm them. Scientists call these "synanthropic animals," and there are concrete ways to make their lives better.

We can prevent vehicle strikes with wildlife crossings, design buildings that don't kill birds, replace lethal population control with contraception, build shelters for harsh weather, and implement health measures that protect both animals and humans from disease transmission.

Wild animals suffer tremendously during extreme weather, storms, droughts, tornadoes, floods, fires, and earthquakes. While people sometimes rescue animals during disasters, we could help far more if institutions included wild animals in their emergency response plans.

Currently, disaster response focuses only on human safety and economic concerns. Animals are forgotten, even though they suffer and die in much higher numbers. Prevention helps too, creating shelters and escape routes can save many lives.

Imagine eliminating a parasite that eats animals alive from an entire continent. It's already happened.

Screwworms used to torture countless animals across North America. These maggots literally eat animals from the inside out, causing weeks of agony before death. Today, they're completely gone from North America thanks to the "sterile insect technique," a humane method that releases sterilized male flies to prevent reproduction without killing existing populations. The Screwworm Free Future campaign aims at expanding this success further.

Similar programs have reduced tsetse fly populations, saving countless animals from trypanosomiasis (also called sleeping sickness), a disease that slowly destroys their ability to think and move normally. These successes prove large-scale parasite elimination works. We just need the will to expand it.

Artificial Intelligence is opening new possibilities for helping wild animals through better monitoring and smarter interventions. AI systems can process images from cameras and satellites to track animal populations and habitat conditions on a massive scale. They can map ecosystem relationships and predict vulnerabilities in food webs and migration routes before they become critical.

By understanding ecosystem changes better, AI can guide interventions that reduce suffering from human-wildlife conflicts, habitat destruction, and natural hazards. This approach helps us be better stewards of ecosystems while prioritizing individual animal welfare and sustainable coexistence.

It's also important that frontier AI systems like LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) learn to think about wild animals as individuals who matter, not just as parts of species or ecosystems. This could encourage more people to support efforts to help them.