About this episode

Bob Fischer discusses the development of the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database and its implications for near-term interventions in wild animal welfare.

The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas is wild animal welfare (WAW), where uncertainty about tractability makes identifying cost-effective interventions particularly challenging. While much of the current WAW work rightly focuses on academic field-building (see Elmore & McAuliffe, 2024), it is worth determining whether there are viable, near-term interventions that are already available or close to implementation. With this goal in mind, we have developed the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database (WAWID). This project evaluates an array of interventions that may be promising for improving WAW in the (relatively) near term, evaluating them relative to criteria of interest to funders, advocates, researchers, and potential implementers across the WAW space. The WAWID is available here: Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database The landing page includes a full list of the interventions and evaluation criteria. This report explains how we developed the WAWID, what we think you can learn from it, and suggest some future…

People in this episode

Guest: Bob Fischer

Topics covered

• wild animal welfare
• interventions
• animal welfare
• cost-effective strategies
• research
• field-building

Keywords

• wild animals
• interventions
• animal welfare
• database
• Rethink Priorities
• cost-effective
• research

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rethink Priorities, Animal Welfare Department

Books & works: Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database

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