Thanks, Vasco! In the long-term, I absolutely agree that accounting for impacts on all sentient animals is important. That is what we're trying to work towards, but we need to approach it gradually for strategic and practical reasons. WAWS needs to advance a lot on several dimensions before we will be able to meaningfully account for soil invertebrates, for example, in welfare impact assessments.

1. Sentience/moral weights: As you suggest in that linked post, research on animal sentience and cross-species comparisons of welfare will be important. These more philosophical questions are not a priority for WAI (partially because others like Rethink Priorities and Heather Browning are working on them), but we do share relevant work and discuss them with scientists in our network.
2. Welfare assessment methods for invertebrates: Assessing welfare for any animal is a challenge, especially in the wild, and there is still mainstream misunderstanding and skepticism over what it means to assess animal welfare and whether it is even within the domain of science. Practice and proof of concept, starting with better understood species, should eventually make it easier and more acceptable for more neglected species. This is a high priority for WAI.
3. Population and community welfare dynamics: This requires welfare assessment methods for multiple species, plus an understanding of how welfare is impacted by ecological and demographic processes in those species. It makes sense to prioritize the species that are easiest to study, with the best understood relationships and needs. But again, this should widen with practice to account for more species. This is also a high priority for WAI.
4. A much more detailed understanding would be required for every problem and potential intervention (e.g., what invertebrate species consume the crumbs left by rats after consuming contraceptive bait?).
5. Considering indirect effects and non-anthropogenic issues: This is an ethical/political challenge. People generally seem to be more open to intervening for the welfare of wild animals in relation to human impacts. Indirect effects are already harder to get people to care about, so it makes sense to start normalizing that in relation to species they already care about or at least can see.

Allowing research and even limited interventions to go ahead without answering all of these questions should allow us to learn more, attract more interest to WAWS, and help normalize the ethics of considering all the animals who we aren't clueless about. In the meantime, we'll be working to reduce cluelessness about the most numerous and otherwise overlooked animals.

Hi Siobhan, I think the key question is how morally valuable an objective you consider improving wild animal welfare to be, and why. “Why” because if someone only cares about reducing the most obvious negative human impacts on wild animals, then field-building is probably not worth the effort. However, if they want to prevent animals dying from botulism in heatwaves, regulate wild animal populations via fertility rather than mortality, or do anything for wild fish and invertebrates, then the cost of building a scientific field is likely unavoidable. To your suggestion that WAI’s field-building is limitless, I will just link back to my reply from last December: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kizAAxyNkDtwShEJ2/wild-animal-initiative-when-does-research-become-impact?commentId=WHsgMhniyfKJNtrmM.

I think my post addresses a lot of your specific criticisms here. It not only acknowledges, but explains why "most funded projects have not yet published results" (all but the earliest-funded projects are ongoing) and why "projects have rarely built on one another" (we chose to fund projects on a wide variety of taxa, welfare issues and assessment methods early on to prioritize learning and establishing the field). If you disagree with those explanations or the choices involved, I'd be happy to consider alternatives.

Similarly, re: "Phase 3 appears designed to correct weaknesses in the previous approach." - that is true, but in the sense that every approach has its weaknesses and its strengths. Our theory of change has always involved multiple phases, and it makes sense that our tactics would change with those phases. If we had launched in 2019 with the kind of posture we’re adopting in ‘phase 3’, we might have more short-term, small-scale interventions to show for it, but we would have been less successful at building a respected field, and we would not have connected with most of the people who are now spearheading WAWS academic institutions and beginning to bring some mainstream funding to WAWS. We would not have received that invitation to curate a special issue of ICB seven years ago, or even three years ago (when the earliest of the grants featured in Figure 1 were awarded). This is the sort of signal and opportunity that has caused our tactics and emphases to evolve through the phases outlined in this post.

The ant/aphid days of experience point isn't a math error but stems from "stable populations" referring to adult populations only. That distinction should probably be restated more clearly through the post, but I do think it's a meaningful one because most of the population size estimates for wild animals only include adults, or at least exclude juveniles below a certain age by which most of them die.

Hi Siobhan! I’m the Science Director at WAI. I'm stepping in to answer your questions here because Cam is on medical leave.

1. “What exactly counts as a self-sustaining academic field for wild animal welfare? Is that defined by number of labs? Funding sources? Course offerings? Publication volume? ‘Self-sustaining’ risks becoming an unending horizon.”
   1. Ultimately, what we care about is generating scientific research that can guide action towards improving wild animal welfare and carries the credibility to persuade policymakers to implement it (or that enables wildlife managers to base decisions on welfare and not just population size - which we're working towards through projects like this). However, we think that both of those things require a scientific field to do effectively at scale. Operationally, we define a “self-sustaining academic field for wild animal welfare” primarily in terms of institutions and funding sources. We would be satisfied that there is one when it has most of the institutional trappings of a field — e.g. at least two out of three of a) a regular conference, b) a dedicated journal, and c) a professional society — with significant momentum coming from value-aligned scientists outside of Wild Animal Initiative, AND a majority of funding for the field coming from sources other than WAI (say >$1M per year). That needs to happen while keeping the priorities of the field aligned with benefiting as many animals as possible by as much as possible, which requires more careful progress than if we were satisfied with a field focused on the welfare of endangered species, for example.
      1. We feel on track to achieve the ‘institutions’ part within the next 5 years at our current level of funding, as we’ve seen great signs of progress in just the last year as some of our earliest grantees (from 2022) have stuck with the field and begun to organize their own events and collaborations related to wild animal welfare.
      2. We have made less progress so far on bringing new mainstream funders explicitly into the field. However, we expect this to follow “institutionalization” of the field, as it comes to their attention in a credible way. This year in particular we have seen some evidence of new funding outside of EA. There have also been early conversations starting this year around particular kinds of academic events and structures that we consider signposts of the field becoming institutionalized (some examples described here), so we’re hopeful to have clearer timelines on this in the near future.
         1. Additionally, in the meantime, many of the projects we fund build on existing projects in some way, which represents indirect co-funding that increases cost-effectiveness.
      3. It’s worth noting that the pathway we are on (of institutionalization → funding diversification) wasn’t/isn’t the only way things could proceed towards field-building. Without the support WAI has received from EA donors, we likely would have prioritized funding diversification first to start building the field, but that would have been much less likely to succeed at all and certainly would have taken much longer to build the field than we currently think it will (at current levels of funding) for us to reach a self-sustaining academic field for wild animal welfare.
      4. Just as an anecdotal piece of evidence, I have worked at WAI since it started in 2019, coming from an academic research background, and I am very surprised and grateful for how the field has been able to develop over this timespan.
2. “What does ‘the long run’ mean in practice?”
   1. You’re right that the honest answer is “as long as it takes,” as with most cause areas. The ultimate goal of improving wild animal welfare is something that we expect will require ongoing management, research and development, like public health for humans. However, academic field building is simply a means to that end, and we do expect it to be ‘achieved’ at some point in the not-so-distant future, as described in my answer to #1.
   2. Overall, we’re basically hoping to take a process that generally occurs over about 50-80 years and shorten it to 15-20 (including the 6 years we’ve already operated) for full success, with the turning point of having mainstream funding being the primary funding source sooner than that.
3. “How much funding do you estimate is required to reach this self-sustaining point?”
   1. If we’re right that institutionalization will catalyze the entry of more mainstream funders into the field, then I think we could reach that goal within another 5-10 years with a total operating budget of $5M/yr (closer to 5 years) to $3M per year (closer to 10 years; our current budget).

So overall, if you think farmed animal welfare can easily absorb an additional $5M per year and maintain high cost effectiveness, and you prefer immediate gains to long term strategies, WAI and wild animal welfare may not be the ideal giving opportunity for you! But if you are comfortable with funding longer-term theories of change, we think it is as cost effective or more so in expectation than farmed animal welfare — particularly at the margin, as there is some reason to think that the farmed animal welfare movement cannot currently absorb more funding than Coefficient can provide.