Like us, wild animals experience good days and bad days; pleasure and pain. To better understand those experiences, a nonprofit organization called Wild Animal Initiative supports scientists in developing wild animal welfare research as a frontier in the life sciences.
For the first time, Wild Animal Initiative is funding a cohort of external research projects that seek answers to previously unexplored questions in wild animal welfare. Seven fully-funded projects will focus on birds, insects, octopuses, and sirens (a taxon of salamanders), while additional partially-funded projects will extend the research scope to even more species. The research teams are based in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Australia.
All of the research projects explore the welfare of juvenile animals, specifically.
"We selected juvenile welfare as the theme for this set of grants because every animal experiences what it is like to be a juvenile member of their species, and juveniles are often particularly vulnerable," said Luke Hecht, Staff Researcher for Wild Animal Initiative. "Studying juveniles presents special challenges and there is much that we don't yet know about their experiences."
After posting a call for proposals and receiving nearly 300 expressions of interest from researchers around the world, Wild Animal Initiative narrowed the list to 50 who were invited to submit full proposals, and then selected the 14 projects that will receive full or partial funding.
"I was really impressed with the quality of the proposals," said Vittoria Elliott, Director of Scientific Affairs at Wild Animal Initiative. "It made the decisions difficult, but we ended up supporting some really high-quality projects that will give us valuable insights."
Wild animal welfare research, sometimes called welfare biology, is an emerging scientific field with big questions to explore. Unlike conservation biology, which focuses on species and habitat protection, welfare biology seeks an understanding of the individual animals' life experiences, with the ultimate goal of identifying ways to reduce their suffering or increase their well-being. Wild Animal Initiative funds research to develop a base of reliable data that will help this field grow.
Wild Animal Initiative expects to distribute an additional $2.5 million in research grants within the next year. Its next call for proposals will be posted this summer.
To learn more, visit https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/grants.
