As part of the EA Forum’s 2025 Marginal Funding Week, we’d like to share with you Wild Animal Initiative’s needs for additional funding, what we would do with it, and how you can help us build a scientific field dedicated to understanding wild animal welfare.

Summary

Wild Animal Initiative’s mission is to accelerate science that helps wild animals — a vast and neglected moral priority. Our strategy focuses on field-building: generating new welfare-relevant knowledge, growing the global community of researchers, and directing more resources toward wild animal welfare science.

But the funding landscape for our work has an uncertain future. With Open Philanthropy exiting this cause area and other large funders shifting priorities, individual donors now play an unusually pivotal role in sustaining progress and preventing the field from losing momentum.

Our 2026 target budget is $4.1 million, supporting our core programs in research, grants, academic outreach, and community infrastructure — plus hiring two new staff to strengthen researcher support and diversify funding. With an additional $3.1 million beyond our target budget, we could achieve our “aspirational” budget, enabling high-leverage projects such as accelerating rodent contraception R&D and establishing research hubs at major universities.

Your support helps boost the growth of our field, reduce wild animal suffering at scale in the long run, and unlock new funding pathways beyond EA.

Why give to Wild Animal Initiative?

Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) is a US-based nonprofit organization that works internationally to accelerate science that helps wild animals, one of the most neglected groups in people’s moral circles. With so much unknown about what wild animals' lives are like and what conditions allow them to individually thrive, we don’t yet know the best scalable ways to help them. But as we bring more researchers into the field and they advance our understanding of wild animal welfare, we can start to close those knowledge gaps and identify interventions that are both safe and maximally effective. Advocates will then apply these research insights to lobby for policies and practices that are scientifically shown to be net-positive for wild animals.

Some areas of wild animal welfare research will advance more quickly than others. Similar to other social movements, this progress will take years, and we expect failures along the way. But eventually we’ll see the change we envision: A world where research informs decisions that affect wild animals, with consideration for their welfare.

For more, we recommend the 80,000 Hours Podcast episode produced last November in which our Executive Director Cameron Meyer Shorb was interviewed. Specifically, the chapters “Can we even help animals without unintended consequences?” (starts at 1:13:20), “Future promising interventions” (starts at 2:21:58), and “What’s the long game for wild animal welfare?” (starts at 2:27:46).

Our field-building strategy is no longer just hypothetical: It’s working.

We define success by growth in three areas: new knowledge about wild animal welfare, resources being directed to the field, and the global membership of the wild animal welfare research community.

As of this year, the researchers on our staff have published 7 peer-reviewed journal articles, which have collectively been cited 65 times, and we have presented our research or led workshops at more than 30 scientific conferences. We have awarded grants to 84 research teams so far, and they are also making progress toward new research insights. Our online community of researchers, students, and professionals in other relevant industries has grown to nearly 600 members.

This year we also organized a day of programming focused on wild animals at the UK's main animal welfare science conference, and we wrapped up the fieldwork stage of our first field research project.

For more, view our 2024 annual report.

We’ve experienced variability with the biggest funders in the movement, so funders like you have a real opportunity to make a difference.

The wild animal welfare movement has experienced notable fluctuations in support from major funders, with some stepping away from the field or shifting their priorities. Open Philanthropy, once a key supporter and responsible for more than half of our budget, no longer funds wild animal welfare. While other funders are beginning to fill some of the gaps, the landscape remains uncertain.

Wild animal welfare is still one of the most resource-constrained and neglected EA cause areas (see this analysis by Rethink Priorities), and although we at Wild Animal Initiative are beginning to diversify our funding base, the long-term picture remains unclear. Without more stable and significant funding, we risk losing the hard-earned momentum toward establishing wild animal welfare as a well-established and self-sustaining field. Support from individuals at this stage is especially significant and can help ensure that progress continues, rather than stagnates.

This forum post by Abraham Rowe explains more about why mid-level donors are especially helpful to nonprofits in general.

Animal Charity Evaluators has recommended Wild Animal Initiative every year since 2020.

View our 2025 evaluation, including a cost-effective analysis of our work.

Room for Funding

Our budget for 2025 was $3,772,000. Our target budget for 2026 is $4,100,000, which would allow us to continue our usual programs and operations in addition to hiring two new staff members and increasing our academic outreach. We are currently $267,000 short of fully funding our target budget.

Any funds raised beyond the target budget would allow us to stretch into our aspirational budget. For the purposes of our Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) evaluation this year, we calculated that we have room for an additional $3,145,000 in this category beyond our regular annual budget, based in part on the needs described in the next section of this post.

How we would use extra funding

Target budget

If our budget of $4,100,000 is fully covered (i.e., if we raise at least another $267,000 by the end of the year), we will be able to:

1. Maintain our usual field-building programs at full capacity. 

Here is a brief summary of each program and some of the new activities they’ll undertake this year.

Research: Conducting research, publishing papers, and presenting our findings at scientific conferences.

• Guide the field by developing new concepts and methods and focusing on neglected topics. Having made progress on basic measurement of wild animal welfare and validation of welfare indicators, and seeing our grantees take up these methods, we intend to pivot our internal research priorities more toward the welfare implications of population and landscape-scale processes.
• Invest more in mentoring postgraduate and postdoctoral research fellows who are based at academic institutions. This is something we’ve done on an ad-hoc basis a few times, and we’ve found it to be a very high-leverage use of our researchers’ time, so we’ve decided to build it into our workflow rather than treat it as a side project.

Grants: Funding research projects at universities and other research institutions around the world to bring other scientists into our field and get more wild animal welfare papers published.

• Strengthen our Fellowship Program by integrating fellows more closely with our internal research team, including via a three-month placement where they will work closely with their WAI research mentor on a literature review or other desk-based research. This will prepare them to analyze the results of their main project in terms of welfare.
• Fund major research projects on the relationship between wild animal welfare and cause-specific mortality, and on the potential for feedback loops between wild animals’ welfare and their behavioral and physiological responses to environmental change. We expect projects funded under both of these themes to inform possible large-scale interventions in the future. For example, by identifying causes of death associated with particularly large indirect welfare impacts, or identifying situations where a relatively modest intervention could disrupt a potential downward spiral of welfare by helping individuals mount more effective responses to challenges in their environment.

Academic Outreach: Fostering the growth and strength of the global community of wild animal welfare scientists by mentoring them, offering workshops, hosting networking events, and more. 

• Host conference sessions and workshops focused on wild animal welfare.
• Launch a networking platform for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers seeking academic supervisors focused on wild animal welfare science, and vice versa.
• Develop educational materials in wild animal welfare science for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.

2. Hire a new member of our Services Team to sustain and strengthen the infrastructure for our scientific community.

Our Services Team is responsible for academic outreach that recruits scientists to our field and helps them find opportunities in wild animal welfare research. We are planning to create a new role that will function as community coordinator for the researchers in our network, as well as an outreach specialist to bring more researchers in. The person in this role will coordinate mentoring and skill development opportunities, and ultimately ideate new activities to strengthen the community.

3. Hire a Foundations Relations Manager to expand our fundraising capacity and diversify our funding.

Currently, we rely heavily on a few key philanthropic sources within the EA community, which makes us vulnerable when their priorities shift. Diversifying funding by securing funders outside of EA is essential for long-term stability and growth. Foundations are especially promising for us: They have specific philanthropic missions that make it easier for us to know exactly where to apply, and they have high giving capacities. We also think establishing relationships with foundations could strengthen our field more broadly over time by developing new funding pathways for others working in wild animal welfare science or advocacy.

In their first year, if successful, a Foundations Relations Manager would recover at least half the cost of their own salary. Based on reports we’ve seen from other organizations, in year two they would raise four times their salary — and often far more — with institutional fundraising frequently returning $7 to $10 for every $1 spent on the role.

With a Foundations Relations Manager on our team, we could break into funding sources outside of the EA ecosystem, decreasing the competition for funding among EA cause areas. This year, we received our first grants from non-EA foundations. We believe there are many more such opportunities to connect our work to funders who focus on specific regions, taxa, or environmental issues, if we can put in the person-hours needed to sift through many leads and craft specialized proposals.

Aspirational budget

With even more funding, we would prioritize:

1. Accelerating rodent contraception research and development.

• Stage 1: $169,000 to $240,000
• Stage 2: $1 million to $3 million (most of which we expect to come from non-EA sources)

Culling via anticoagulant poisons is a widespread cause of intense, prolonged suffering for wild rodents. Replacing lethal control with fertility control has the potential to be a highly scalable way to reduce wild animal suffering with minimal ecological risk. Unfortunately, pilot projects using currently available products have repeatedly failed to demonstrate their efficacy in the field. More research is needed to either determine how to use existing products effectively or to develop effective alternatives.

We think the most cost-effective way forward is a research competition, which would incentivize innovation by offering a grand prize that only gets paid out to the team that develops the best solution. We would do this in partnership with Conservation X Labs (CXL), which specializes in running such competitions (e.g., the Global Cooling Prize), and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC), which is the foremost research organization in the field.

The project has two stages. Stage 1 is centered around “the Big Think,” an in-person gathering of scientists and donors that serves two purposes: defining technical parameters of the competition and securing buy-in from the funders who will ultimately supply prize money. Stage 2 is running the Open Innovation Challenge itself: attracting contestants, pairing researchers with private R&D partners, selecting semi-finalists who will be awarded seed funding to develop prototypes, evaluating prototypes, and awarding the final prize.

A full Big Think would cost $240,000, covering technical research, event planning, travel, and hosting. The reason we’re aiming for such a large budget is because CXL has found that holding these events in exotic conservation hotspots can make or break whether large donors make time in their schedule to attend, and whether they leave the event excited enough to fund the next phase. For rodent contraception, an ideal location would be a remote island where invasive rodents threaten rare native birds (e.g., Hawai’i, the Azores, the Galápagos, the Seychelles).

If we cannot fund a full Big Think, we could convene a smaller scientific meeting for $169,000. This would still generate a rigorous, actionable R&D agenda, but it would not provide the donor experience needed to unlock funding for the competition itself.

Ultimately, running the Open Innovation Challenge will require an additional $1 million to $3 million. Larger budgets enable larger prizes with more ambitious success criteria (e.g., not just demonstrating efficacy, but also developing a fully market-ready product). We plan to raise funds for this stage primarily from non-EA donors with direct interests in the outcome, such as pesticide producers, conservation philanthropies focused on island biodiversity, and regional funders eager to reduce urban rat populations. These are the types of donors that CXL’s Big Think model is designed to mobilize. By funding the Big Think, EA donors have the opportunity to unlock many times more dollars from non-EA funders.

2. Institutionalizing wild animal welfare at universities.

Up to $2,227,000, which includes:

• Up to $1,440,000 to fund up to eight research fellows for one year each ($180,000 per fellow)
• Up to $787,000 to fund research hubs at up to five universities (cost varies by university)

Based on our analysis of how other fields have formed, it will be important for research “hubs” to develop — clusters of scientists at the same university who explicitly work on wild animal welfare and coordinate their efforts through things like seminar series, journal clubs, and lab exchanges. These will facilitate the formation of a cohort of staff and students in a relevant department who are invested in the field of wild animal welfare science long-term, and provide a basis for launching a formal and distinct program for wild animal welfare science.

Fellowships are a key component of this strategy because they allow us to place graduate students and postdocs who are enthusiastic about wild animal welfare into potential hub departments, where WAI researchers can continue to have a hand in their project as co-advisors. In addition to exposing fellows to the philosophical reasons for working to improve wild animal welfare, WAI fellowships equip them with an interdisciplinary skillset uniquely valued by the field of wild animal welfare science, which should provide further motivation to continue working on wild animal welfare as their career progresses.

We have established relationships with multiple aligned researchers at UCLA, Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Bristol and the Royal Veterinary College, to name a few, and so these institutions are most likely to be among the first hubs of wild animal welfare science. The researchers we know at these institutions could become fellows or faculty mentors.

Establishing a research hub requires funding for fellowship stipends, plus things like major scientific equipment and the administrative costs of running courses and events.

We value transparency and we welcome you to contact us if you have any questions. Donate here to support our work and make the world a better place for wild animals.

All photos by Wild Animal Initiative staff.