This intervention report reviews the evidence on supplemental feeding of wild animals. This paper uses the Five Domains/Five Freedoms framework, which is commonly used to assess the welfare of both domestic and wild animals.
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Many people propose providing supplemental food to wildlife in order to promote their welfare. However, it is likely that providing supplemental food actually causes wild-animal suffering.
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Studies show that backyard bird feeding may lead to disease transmission. Over two years of a study, fed birds were more likely to experience transmissible diseases than unfed birds were.
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This is the first of a series of posts exploring how different ethical systems affect how people should react to wild-animal suffering.
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There is one simple action any cat or dog owner can do to help wildlife and the environment at the same time: keep their animals inside.
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In mid-April, we ran our first online Q&A. The goal was to give our audience an opportunity to ask questions they had about our work, strategy, plans and mission.
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A “crucial consideration”– a term invented by Nick Bostrom– is a piece of evidence that radically changes the value of pursuing a particular intervention or focus area.
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The level of low-frequency ambient noise in the open ocean has doubled every decade since the 1950s; this increase in noise levels is primarily anthropogenic, associated with transportation, development, and resource extraction.
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In the next two to three years, I intend to write a series of papers summarizing the evidence about a handful of broad areas of intervention into wild-animal suffering.
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Many people in the wild-animal suffering space think it would be a good idea to make a discipline of “welfare biology”.
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In order to understand wild-animal welfare, we must be able to measure it. To target the most important causes of wild-animal suffering, it is important to understand which animals suffer the most and what causes their suffering.
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Many people argue that suffering predominates in nature. A really simple form of the argument, supported by people like Brian Tomasik, is what one might call the argument from life history.
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I sometimes see people claiming very confidently that wild-animal welfare is completely intractable and there are no cost-effective interventions we can do to improve wild animals’ welfare.
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Euthanizing elderly elephants might seem like a good way to prevent their suffering from starvation. Unfortunately, while there’s little good evidence about how many elephants die of molar loss, the research on causes of death suggests that it’s relatively rare…
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