Announcing Wild Animal Initiative
Today, we are pleased to announce that Wild-Animal Suffering Research (WASR) and Utility Farm (UF) are merging together to form a new organization focused solely on wild animal welfare — Wild Animal Initiative. Over the last year, we (Wild-Animal Suffering Research and Utility Farm) have become increasingly aware that our work overlaps significantly, and that…
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Biannual Project Evaluation - T2, 2018
This evaluation looks at our progress during the second six months (“T2”) of 2018 and assesses the extent to which our activities have allowed us to make progress towards our strategic goals. As our team worked very few hours during this evaluation period, this document is considerably briefer than our previous evaluation.
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Biannual Project Evaluation - T1, 2018
This evaluation looks at our progress during the first six months (“T1”) of 2018 and assesses the extent to which our activities have allowed us to make progress towards our strategic goals. It also includes our most significant mistakes and issues as well as our priorities for the second six months (“T2”) of 2018.
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Clean Your Bird Feeders
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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Wild Animals: A Rights-Based Approach
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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How Pet Owners Can Help Wild Animals And The Environment
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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Online Q&A - April 2018
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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Some Crucial Considerations for WAS
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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Reducing Aquatic Noise To Help Fish
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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Are seafood substitutes good for wild fish?
Seafood replacements products (which include plant-based products or those made from cell culture) are gaining popularity and traction across the world. Fish, meanwhile, are the most numerous vertebrates killed by humans.
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Our Room For More Funding - 2018
We estimate we can use up to $161,205 for the next 18 months in additional funding to continue and expand our research.
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Our Plans for 2018
The Wild-Animal Suffering Research (WASR) project is fundraising for 2018. This post outlines our plans for next year. If you’d like to support our work, help us fill our room for more funding.
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Ozy Brennan's Research Plan
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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Persis Eskander's Research Plan
Wild-animal suffering is a problem of immense proportions. Unfortunately, we do not currently have viable large-scale solutions to it.
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Georgia Ray's Research Plan
My personal interest in wild-animal suffering (WAS) research, and in spreading knowledge about WAS, is mostly in assessing existing wild-animal suffering.
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Creating Welfare Biology: A Research Proposal
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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Infant Mortality and the Argument from Life History
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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We Have No Idea If There Are Cost-Effective Interventions Into Wild-Animal Suffering
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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Introducing the Wild-Animal Suffering Research Project
We’re very excited to announce that the Wild-Animal Suffering Research project has just launched its new website.
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