Five Wild Animal Welfare Organizations estimate $3-8M in room for additional funding in 2027

By Rethink Priorities @ 2026-08-14T11:06 (+26)

Summary

1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to room for roughly $3.16M–$8.23M in additional funding in 2027. The lower range reflects claims about how additional funding can bolster their current strategies, while the higher range reflects claims as to how substantially greater funding could be used to pursue more ambitious strategies. However, we give reasons below for why this might be an undercount.
3. We briefly discuss the merits of a dedicated WAW fund. This could give prospective large donors a clear donation option and help diversify a movement currently concentrated in scientific field-building.

Why Estimate the RFMF for WAW Organizations?

There are good reasons to consider directing marginal funding toward WAW. Wild animals outnumber farmed animals by several orders of magnitude. Our understanding of their welfare remains limited, but high birth rates and low average lifespans^1,2 lead some to suggest that wild animals' average welfare may be very low. There are also comparatively few people working on this cause area. 

Tractability remains a significant challenge. The scale of wild animal populations complicates both identifying interventions and delivering them widely, while the neglectedness of this issue means even those sympathetic to animal welfare generally may not consider prioritizing wild animal welfare. 

This is something additional funding may be able to change. If research can be rapidly scaled up; if awareness can be spread and concern for wild animals normalized; and if policymakers can be persuaded to begin helping animals in low-risk, politically palatable ways, then we could begin to help wild animals at scale. However, doing so would require a significant increase in funding. 

There are a number of reasons to anticipate that new funding might be coming to the EA ecosystem, and there might potentially be very significant new funding ahead. This raises the question: if some of that funding was directed to WAW, could those organizations use it to scale up their activities effectively, and how much?

In an attempt to answer this, we organized a collective estimate of WAW's room for more funding. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to consider what additional activities they would pursue with increased funding to bolster their current strategy, and what they would pursue if granted substantially more funding to support a more ambitious one. Together, this produced a room-for-more-funding range for each organization. Two organizations we contacted declined to participate.

For both estimates, we asked them to only include: 

• Activities for 2027 that are not covered by current funding or funding that is likely to renew;
• Where marginal dollars would be used at least 75% as effectively as their most cost-effective current program. 

We presented each with a report template and a financials spreadsheet (the latter adapted from Animal Charity Evaluators’ own room-for-more-funding spreadsheet), which standardized how they reported budgets, planned activities, and their lower- and upper-bound estimates.

Rethink Priorities provided the framework for these estimates and conducted a light review to ensure a consistent approach across organizations. We did not independently vet any organization's figures, and this post should not be taken as an endorsement by Rethink Priorities of any of these organizations or their estimates. Each organization has prepared and stands behind its own figures, and Rethink Priorities' own Animal Welfare Department took part in the exercise on the same basis as the others.

The Result

A summary table is presented below.

These figures sum together to produce a total RFMF estimate of $3.16M–$8.23M for 2027.

In addition to each organization’s RFMF estimate, the full report also details each org’s:

1. Theory of change
2. The activities they would pursue with more funding
3. Track record
4. Evaluation measures

Scientific Field-Building Remains Important, But WAW Must Diversify

On these estimates, Wild Animal Initiative — whose primary goal is to build the scientific field of WAW — receives most of the funding across these organizations and reports the greatest capacity to absorb more. The other organizations are smaller and report less ability to absorb additional funding. However, this should not be equated with their being less important — the scientific field is growing, and spreading concern for wild animals into other disciplines and audiences outside of academia may be important in order to apply emerging research findings.

An important caveat is that this estimate by no means captures the WAW movement as a whole. As well as the two organizations that did not take part, there are:

• Organizations doing work that supports our understanding of WAW without having dedicated workstreams on it, for example, Faunalytics and Welfare Footprint Institute.
• Individuals working on WAW projects without being part of a formal WAW organization.
• Many not-yet-founded organizations which would help to diversify this field further. For example, we could fund organizations to campaign for humane pest control, to conduct policy or awareness-building in other countries.

Does WAW Deserve a Fund of its Own?

One approach to the funding opportunities presented here, as well as others that were not captured, is to route donations through existing animal welfare regrantors, some of which already fund the organizations listed above. A share of any increase in philanthropic funding might trickle down to WAW organizations this way. But relying on general animal welfare regrantors could leave WAW vulnerable in several regards. So, here are a few reasons for a separate, designated WAW fund to exist:

1. Broad animal welfare funds often tend to attract donors who are likely to prioritize farmed animal work, and attract fewer donors who don’t prioritize farmed animals at all, yet who are convinced by the neglectedness and scale of WAW.
2. Without a specific WAW fund, donors interested in this cause area might choose to simply donate to the organization they have heard of, leaving more niche WAW opportunities neglected.
3. WAW, as an emerging cause area, might be hard to pitch to some existing funds, particularly those whose focus has so far been limited to farmed animal interventions.
4. There is always the risk that animal welfare regrantors shift their strategy and choose not to prioritize WAW in a given year, leaving the movement vulnerable.
5. Finally, there are a number of reasons for favoring grantmaker diversity in general, so a separate WAW fund would ideally exist alongside general animal welfare funds. 

However, there are also potential objections to this proposal:

1. A fund would require grantmaker capacity and overhead, costing the movement both financially and in talented workers, both of which are very scarce.
2. $3–8M of annual room-for-more-funding remains small relative to other animal welfare funds. This funding gap may end up fully covered by existing funds.
3. A dedicated WAW fund could create the perception that the movement’s funding needs are taken care of, causing other grantmakers to reduce the funds that they distribute to WAW organizations, resulting in less funding going to WAW overall.

Both sets of considerations for and against this proposal should be weighed when evaluating whether to create a new fund. But assuming that 1) funds are coming, 2) the movement can absorb significant capital, and 3) WAW is a neglected, important, and tractable cause area, the question may not be whether WAW deserves its own fund, but if now is the time.

Contributions and Acknowledgments

The full report is a project of Rethink Priorities—a think-and-do tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. Tristan Katz coordinated the project and edited the report; representatives of each organization wrote the associated sub-sections and produced their estimates: Cameron Meyer Shorb, Cat Kerr, Luke Hecht, Ben Stevenson, Sagar Shah, Oscar Horta, Richard Parr, Olaia Freiría, Jeff Sebo, Aditya S. Karanam, Alyse Spiehler, Hannah Tookey, Adalene Minelli, Lara La Barbera. Alyse Spiehler and William McAuliffe oversaw the project. Thanks to Shane Coburn for editing and Urszula Zarosa for feedback.

 Parts of this content were prepared with the assistance of AI tools (such as Claude and Gemini), which we use to improve efficiency and readability. All outputs are supervised, reviewed, and fact-checked by our staff, who remain responsible for the final content.