Hi Friend,



January was a month of big wins and even bigger plans.



We passed two major milestones on the road to bringing wild animal welfare research into the mainstream. The first paper by Wild Animal Initiative authors and the first paper by a Wild Animal Initiative-funded independent researcher were both published in academic journals!



Our hard work in 2019 paid off. Now, we want to take it to the next level. So our geographically disparate team met in person for the first time and set about asking big questions. What would success look like for the wild animal welfare movement? How can Wild Animal Initiative get us there? What steps do we take next?



In the end, we affirmed our commitment to fostering the growth of a scientific community dedicated to understanding and improving the lives of animals in the wild. We also realized we need to update our approach to making that happen. Last year, our top priority was authoring novel research to demonstrate what this new field could look like. Now that we’ve shown that can be done, we’re shifting our focus to collaborating with external researchers and institutions to grow the pool of scientists working on wild animal welfare.



Thanks for being with us every step of the way.



All my best,

Cameron

January Highlights

Research Wild Animal Initiative published our first paper in an academic journal! Researcher Jane Capozzelli, Researcher Luke Hecht, and our University of Missouri collaborator Dr. Samniqueka Halsey make the case in Restoration Ecology that wild animal welfare and restoration ecology could mutually benefit each other ( full text here ).

Our first sponsored paper was published in Animals (open-access). Funded by a grant from Wild Animal Initiative’s predecessor, Wild-Animal Suffering Research, Laetitia Nunny reviewed the welfare impacts of lethal and non-lethal methods of predator control.

To encourage feedback and discussion, we’ve been crossposting our white papers and research posts to the Effective Altruism Forum. January additions include Researcher Simon Liedholm’s persistence and reversibility white paper and Luke’s optimal population density research post. Earlier posts include Researcher Hollis Howe’s humane insect management white paper and Research Fellow Dr. Will Bradshaw’s biomarkers of aging report.

Outreach Luke met with a wildlife management researcher to discuss potential collaborations related to turtle headstarting: reducing juvenile mortality of a threatened turtle species by raising the turtles in captivity during the most dangerous early days of their lives. We were pleased to hear the researcher reference our persistence and reversibility report in their description of the intervention (headstarting would have high reversibility but low persistence), suggesting that even our more theoretical research is already useful to wildlife managers.

Jane and Luke submitted abstracts to the RE3 2020 Conference (“Restore, Reclaim, Rewild”) and the Oxford Summer School on Animal Ethics , where they’ll introduce the wild animal welfare perspective and explain its implications for restoration, rewilding, and wildlife management.

Wild animal welfare may be neglected within academia, but it drives many of the people on the front lines of helping wildlife. Jane met with staff of the Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center in New York City. They discussed the relationship between wild animal welfare and conservation, the potential to scale up rehabilitation techniques, and the role rehabilitators play in developing grassroots support for wild animal welfare.

Organizational growth This month we learned that Facebook counterfactually matched $5,872 of our Giving Tuesday donations (bringing us just shy of our $25,000 goal). Thank you all so much for your speedy donations!

The entire Wild Animal Initiative team assembled for the first time! We met in New York - a symbolic “halfway” point between Madison, Wisconsin and Stockholm, Sweden - to build team cohesion and tackle big-picture questions.

At the retreat, we developed a theory of change for Wild Animal Initiative’s role in the wild animal welfare movement. Since then, we’ve been refining the model and questioning its assumptions. We’re looking forward to sharing our thoughts with you soon.

Executive Director Michelle Graham and Deputy Director Cameron Meyer Shorb began translating the theory of change into a revised strategic plan for 2020.

Everyone contributed to forthcoming changes to our website to make a more compelling case for wild animal welfare.

Michelle, Cam, and Hollis were busier than ever with behind-the-scenes tasks to keep our ship sailing smoothly: preparing for tax season, improving our time tracking systems, updating our website, and researching ways to get administrative tasks done faster and more cost-effectively.