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. 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 on existing projects in some way, which represents indirect co-funding and 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.