About wild animal welfare
What is wild animal welfare?
Wild animals can feel happiness and suffering. We believe every wild animal should have a good life.
Governments make decisions that affect wild animal lives every day. But they almost never consider what that means from the perspective of the wild animals. The Center for Wild Animal Welfare works to ensure wild animal welfare is appropriately considered by policymakers.
How is wild animal welfare different from conservation?
Conservation asks whether a species or an ecosystem will survive. Wild animal welfare asks whether an individual animal has a good life: what do they experience; do they suffer from pain and distress, or experience positive welfare? We find that most people care about both conservation and animal welfare.
There are some issues that matter from a wild animal welfare perspective, but aren't addressed by conservation thinking (and vice-versa). Conservation focuses on helping endangered species recover, while wild animal welfare is concerned with helping individual animals from all species, including the most abundant species, have better lives.
When conservation and wild animal welfare do look at the same issues, they sometimes make different recommendations. Some diseases can be part of a functioning ecosystem, but raise serious concerns about the welfare of animals living in that ecosystem. For another example, protecting a ‘native’ species might mean killing members of an ‘invasive’ species, often in ways that cause significant suffering. Wild animal welfare advocates know that animal welfare has to be balanced against other important goals, but we think we should always look for the most humane ways to manage ecosystems and wild populations.
Our team
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Richard Parr MBE
Richard is the Director of the Center for Wild Animal Welfare. Prior to founding CWAW, he served as Special Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, and then Managing Director of The Good Food Institute Europe.
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Ben Stevenson
Ben is the Policy Researcher at the Center for Wild Animal Welfare. Prior to cofounding CWAW, he worked as a researcher at Rethink Priorities and Animal Ask. Ben studied at the University of Oxford.
Careers
The Center for Wild Animal Welfare is not hiring at the moment.
Please get in touch if you would like to be updated about any future opportunities.
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