Authors: Willem Sleegers, David Moss, William McAuliffe, David Reinstein and Daniela Waldhorn (2025)
What’s the article about? (At a glance)
Background: Even though wild animals represent more than 99% of the animals living on the planet, they have been given very little attention both in research and advocacy. Human-animal studies have largely focused on companion animals, though with a recent upturn in work on the exploitation of animals, particularly within food systems. Donations to animal charities are still disproportionately funnelled towards companion animals (e.g., animal shelters) as opposed to animals in factory farms, labs or suffering in the wild.
The recent PHAIR paper by Sleegers, Moss, McAuliffe, Reinstein and Waldhorn bucks this research trend by focusing on the topic of wild animal welfare. The authors argue that wild animal suffering has been historically neglected largely because many people see wild animals as falling outside the sphere of human responsibility. Further, the immense scale of wild animal suffering may cause compassion collapse or a sense that little can be done to ease animal suffering. Nonetheless, there are many good reasons why advocacy groups should prioritise the suffering of wild animals (see especially ACE’s arguments based on principles of effective altruism).
Research aims: The present research was aimed at developing and validating a psychometric instrument – the Attitudes towards Wild Animal Welfare (AWAW) scale – that can be used to quantify attitudes towards wild animal welfare. The scale classifies attitudes along four related dimensions or subscales (with 4 items per subscale):
- caring about wild animal suffering (e.g., “I care about the difficulties wild animals face in their natural environment, even when these are solely due to nature”);
- support for interventions to ameliorate wild animal suffering (e.g., “We should intervene in nature to reduce the natural hardships wild animals face”);
- an idyllic view of nature (i.e., the view that life in the wild is generally pleasant; e.g., “In their natural environment, unaffected by humans, wild animals live pleasant lives”);
- a belief that interventions will be ineffective (e.g., “It is not possible to solve the problems that wild animals face in nature”).
Summary of findings: Across four studies (total N = 2,949), the authors developed and validated the AWAW, confirming the 4-item, four component structure.
- Correlates: positive attitudes towards wild animal welfare (i.e., higher caring and support, and lower levels of idyllic views and ineffectiveness beliefs) were shown to relate to lower levels of speciesism and greater willingness to donate money to a wild animal charity (Wild Animal Initiative) as part of a donation task where windfall funds could be divided between one of three charities.
- The AWAW was shown to capture a construct distinct from basic optimism-pessimistic attitudes.
- Demographics: women tended to score higher than men on all AWAW components but ineffectiveness beliefs. Non-omnivores tended to score higher than omnivores on all components but idyllic views of nature.
Implications for advocacy
The AWAW should serve as an invaluable tool for assessing which segments of the population support interventions on behalf of wild animals. Initial research has already unearthed important differences associated with gender and diet. The authors envision their scale being used to test how wild animal welfare attitudes shift across development (e.g., the attitudes of young people compared to adults) and how they relate to broader attitudes towards wildlife management (e.g., attitudes towards lethal vs. nonlethal forms of management).
Quick Link
The paper “Measuring Wild Animal Welfare Attitudes: The Attitudes towards Wild Animal Welfare Scale” was published in Volume 4 (2025) of the PHAIR journal.
To read the full open-access paper, go here
Blog post by Jared Piazza for PHAIR
Cover photo by Fidel Fernando
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