“Linkpost: A landscape analysis of wild animal welfare” by William McAuliffe, Holly_Elmore, Rethink Priorities

This is a link post. Executive Summary Introductions to wild animal welfare as a moral concern abound, but there is no centralized overview of efforts to help wild animals. Using interviews and publicly available material, we describe the theories of change of five organizations working on wild animal welfare: Wild Animal Initiative, Welfare Footprint, Animal Ethics, Animal Charity Evaluators, and New York University's (NYU) Wild Animal Welfare program. Our synthesis reveals several commonalities: Academic outreach is the main tactic. Organizations have a cautious attitude towards controversial efforts to ameliorate non-anthropogenic harms. Organizations have focused mostly on helping mammals and birds so far. All organizations have room for more funding. To contextualize these trends, we assume that there are three preconditions to improving the aggregate welfare of wild animals at scale: Valid measurement: Knowledge of (a) how to measure the welfare of wild animals and (b) the causal relationships [...] --- First published: June 12th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/huQJtxcDHbbyuraR2/linkpost-a-landscape-analysis-of-wild-animal-welfare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.