“A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer

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 directions for this work (conditional on funding). A future report will provide some descriptive statistics.

How we developed the WAWID

We launched this project in [...]

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Outline:

(01:34) How we developed the WAWID

(08:14) Initial observations

(13:13) Limitations

(15:20) Future Directions

(16:48) Acknowledgements

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First published:
March 25th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pEbiEmeu2agEHJgyu/a-database-of-near-term-interventions-for-wild-animals

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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