Understanding The Differences Between Wildlife Conservation And Wild Animal Welfare

The key difference between conservation and wild animal welfare is the overall aim of the research: While conservationists research how to preserve species or ecosystems, wild animal welfare scientists study the subjective experiences of the individual wild animals within those groups. Ideally, wild animal welfare science will uncover insights and data that can be used to improve the lives of wild animals.

The fundamental unit in conservation is usually a group, such as a population of animals or an entire species. In wild animal welfare science, the fundamental unit is the individual. Wild animal welfare science uses information and methods from animal welfare science, ecology, cognitive science, and other fields to understand the welfare of wild animals. But it is fundamentally different from those fields, too, because its ultimate purpose is to produce science that can improve welfare rather than increase biodiversity or improve ecosystem function.

A conservationist might study how a protected area of habitat could maximize the reproduction of members of a particular species, or maximize biodiversity in general. But whether the individual animals in that habitat are actually living good lives likely wouldn’t be one of the researcher’s concerns, unless it was directly relevant to biodiversity outcomes. A wild animal welfare scientist, though, would be more interested in whether the animals in that area are having net-positive welfare experiences than they are with how many of them there are or how diverse the species in that area are.

Here’s an example:

In a study published last year, researchers examined how the 2019–2020 Australian megafires affected biodiversity in the regions of Australia that were impacted by the fires. They identified the ecosystems in which greater numbers of particular taxa died, and pinpointed the conditions under which negative responses to the fires were ameliorated. The researchers were interested in learning how reductions in populations of particular species as a result of wildfires could be avoided so that those species can be better preserved next time wildfires hit those particular regions of Australia.

But a wild animal welfare scientist interested in the effects of forest fires on wild animals might ask totally different questions: How many total animals died in the fires, how many were injured, and to what degree? They might want to collect supplementary information about how the pain of burning compares with other causes of death, in order to help determine how much to prioritize preventing wildfire deaths compared with other causes of suffering. The goal would be to understand how fires affect the welfare of the individuals they impact, and on what scale that suffering occurs.

Another way of thinking about this is that, while conservation’s aim is to preserve biodiversity for the benefits that it provides to humans — be they ecosystem services like crop pollination and fresh water; natural resources (including using wild animals as resources); or cultural and recreational values — the aim of wild animal welfare research is to learn about wild animals’ lives and how we can improve them. If we could ask wild animals about their own priorities, it’s possible that they would tell us that the preservation of their species is less of a concern for them than their own well-being and that of the other animals they directly interact with.

Of course, many conservationists do care about the well-being of individual animals; that concern might even be what led them to conduct research on preserving habitats and species. But the assumption that the best thing for an animal’s well-being is always to preserve their habitat or species has not been thoroughly investigated. As one example of a scenario in which this is not the case: Members of a large human population within a stable environment might still struggle to find food, be exposed to extreme weather events, or suffer from disease without medical care. It could be true for some animals living in the wild, too, that a stable population does not guarantee good welfare.

Sources Of Harm

One strand of conservation thinking goes beyond the boundaries of traditional practice. Compassionate conservation is concerned with the impacts of conservation interventions on the well-being of wild animals. A compassionate conservationist might argue that we should find alternatives to poisoning and trapping animals belonging to a species considered “invasive,” for instance.

Compassionate conservation is still distinct from wild animal welfare science, however, in its focus on conservation interventions and anthropogenic harms to wild animals. Because compassionate conservation’s concern is how to make conservation interventions less harmful to animals, the fundamental focus on conservation of biodiversity remains. Wild animal welfare scientists instead ask questions about which issues cause the most significant harm to individual wild animals in terms of scale or intensity. We can’t be sure, but to an animal, it probably doesn’t matter whether their suffering is the result of something humans have done, like clear-cutting a forest habitat for timber, or the result of something that would occur even in the absence of human activity, like starvation and many diseases — either way, they just want their suffering to end. Wild animal welfare scientists are interested in understanding all of these sources of harm so we can ultimately mitigate them, just as we aim to do for humans.

Who Matters?

Another key difference between conservation and wild animal welfare is that, while conservation often focuses on rare, endangered species, whose members by definition are few in number, wild animal welfare science is most interested in very common species. This is because if we want to reduce suffering for the greatest number of individuals possible, it makes sense to have a strong research focus on the most common species. This ensures that research efforts are focused on understanding and helping the majority of wild animals rather than a rare few.

Research on endangered species might still be useful in investigating welfare — for example, by validating a welfare indicator or approach that could be used to study more common species. Because it’s critical to understand network effects of welfare, research on endangered or rare species also overlaps with welfare research when those species are studied in their capacity as umbrella species or as drivers of ecosystem dynamics.

The State Of The Fields

Wildlife conservation is an established discipline, though the field has evolved since its formal beginnings in the 1800s, with early focuses on preserving scenic landscapes and “game” animals being supplanted with concerns about biodiversity, resources, and livelihoods in recent decades. As a result, there is a very large body of conservation research that informs policy and practice, including the management of national and state parks.

Wild animal welfare science is a much younger — and correspondingly smaller — field, so its body of research is much less advanced at this stage. We don’t yet have answers to some of the most foundational questions that will inform our eventual wild animal welfare interventions, like “What are animals’ lives like in the wild?” and “How can we measure wild animal welfare?”. This is why Wild Animal Initiative works to grow the field and accelerate research within it. Once wild animal welfare becomes a large, self-sustaining field, and many of the most important questions have been answered, those in the wild animal welfare movement will be able to advocate for responsible interventions.

How Wild Animal Welfare Scientists And Conservationists Can Work Together

We know that conserving biodiversity doesn’t necessarily reduce wild animal suffering, and that reducing wild animal suffering doesn’t necessarily conserve biodiversity. It may even be the case that the value systems motivating welfare and conservation, and the interventions they recommend as a result, could conflict at times.

We don’t know enough about wild animal welfare to know where activities to benefit welfare will also benefit species conservation, or vice versa. But there certainly seem to be cases where it may be possible to advance both goals simultaneously.

Animal translocations are a great example of this. Translocations are a conservation intervention wherein animals are reintroduced to an area from which their species had previously been extirpated. Unfortunately, they’re often unsuccessful. Animals often starve or are killed by predators; one study found that more than half of captive-bred black-footed ferrets died within a month after reintroduction in one translocation project, and similar numbers have been found for wild beavers and wild female black bears.

One reason that has been proposed for these mortality rates is that the experience of translocation, which involves capture, transport, and captivity, can be highly stressful. Translocated animals might also struggle to find food and shelter in unfamiliar release sites, leading to starvation, dehydration, exposure, and fear. The experience often leads to poor health and chronic stress.

With a better understanding of what causes and prevents wild animal suffering, interventions like translocations would be more successful in restoring species to particular locations where their populations are most likely to thrive — and in preventing the suffering of the translocated animals.

There are other areas in which an understanding of wild animal welfare would benefit conservation efforts, and vice versa. Reducing human-wildlife conflict, for instance, might be made easier by a better understanding of animal behavior, and how human-caused disturbances impact wild animals’ quality of life, as this knowledge could help us disincentivize activities that cause conflict.

Conservation research can also have co-benefits for wild animal welfare. The findings of the Australian megafires study, for instance, could be highly valuable to wild animal welfare scientists, who would want to know which animals are most impacted and how to mitigate those impacts — not because they want to prevent population declines, but in the interest of preventing or mitigating the suffering that wildfires cause.

Although there are additional practical areas of relevance for interventions, wildlife managers are already actively engaged with wild animals in the areas of population control, disease control, rehabilitation, restoration, conservation, and climate change. These areas therefore represent the most viable opportunities for interventions that could be impactful. Identifying ways to address the welfare needs of wild animals, and improving practices for interventions in these areas, are important areas of research.

Looking Ahead: The Future Of Conservation And Wild Animal Welfare

We know very little about what animals’ lives are like in the wild because welfare is a highly neglected topic in studies of wild animals. Understanding wild animal welfare will require many more scientific advances — but it will also be a deeply hopeful endeavor.

Expanding the concept of conservation to include not only the existence of species, but also the health, safety, and happiness of wild animals, opens the door to a better future. We’ve made tremendous strides in improving public health, reducing child mortality, and producing food more efficiently and reliably. Anti-speciesism teaches us that wild animals are worthy of our moral consideration too. And science can give us the information and technology that will make it possible to help them.

How Wild Animal Initiative Supports Wild Animal Welfare Science

Wild Animal Initiative’s mission is to accelerate progress in the emerging field of wild animal welfare science. We do this through our three core programs: research, grants, and services for researchers.

When selecting research projects to fund, WAI takes into account the number of individuals who will benefit either directly or indirectly from the project. A project that is exclusively beneficial to an endangered species is less likely to meet this criterion.

Because natural threats to welfare (those not directly caused by human activity) receive less attention relative to how common they are, WAI tends to prioritize projects that focus on those — such as parasites and disease. Human-animal interactions like those studied in conservation are less of a focus for WAI, but still an important area for scientists in our field to explore. For example, identifying more humane ways to manage populations has great potential to improve the lives of many wild animals.

Because we believe there is strong potential for conservationists and wild animal welfare scientists to work together, we reach out to researchers in conservation, ecology, and related fields to raise awareness of wild animal welfare science and learn how their research could benefit from engaging with it. If you’re a conservation researcher or practitioner and you’re interested in learning more about how you can get involved in wild animal welfare science, we encourage you to get in touch.