These reading modules are put together by the members of the group Wild Animal Welfare Project Discussion as part of the Wild Animal Welfare Literature Library Project.

This series of articles and essays together lay out crucial considerations explaining and underpinning wild animal welfare as a potential focus area for effective altruism. These modules are intended to serve multiple functions:

Concentrate a record of scholarship and knowledge produced on wild animal welfare on a single, publicly accessible forum.
Provide convenient access to references containing high-fidelity information on wild animal welfare.
Provide meetup/community organizers in the effective altruism (EA) and the Reducing Wild Animal Suffering movements with convenient access to online materials for community-building and resource mobilization.

Introductory Material

Brian Tomasik. The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets. Therefore, animal advocates should consider focusing their efforts to raise concern about the suffering that occurs in the natural environment. While in theory this could involve trying directly to engineer more humane ecological systems, in practice I think activists should concentrate on promoting the meme of caring about wild animals to other activists, academics, and other sympathetic groups. The massive amount of suffering occurring now in nature is indeed tragic, but it pales by comparison to the scale of good or harm that our descendants -- with advanced technological capability -- might effect. I fear, for instance, that future humans may undertake terraforming, directed panspermia, or sentient simulations without giving much thought to the consequences for wild animals. Our #1 priority should be to ensure that future human intelligence is used to prevent wild-animal suffering, rather than to multiply it.

Brian Tomasik. Should We Intervene in Nature?

I think we have an obligation to exercise our rare position in the history of life to do the best we can in replacing the consequences of evolution's singular focus on reproductive survival of species with a humane approach that values instead the emotions of individual sentient organisms.

Jacy Reese (2015). Wild animals endure illness, injury, an...

Intro to wild animal welfare