The One Health Paradigm and Wild Animal Welfare Science

Initiatives protecting wild animal health, including vaccination campaigns, medical treatments, and parasite control programs, have been implemented for decades. Their goal has been to safeguard human well-being, as well as to further conservationist goals. This paper argues that the well-being of wild animals, considered as sentient individuals, should be another crucial reason to expand these measures. Rather than treating animal health in a purely instrumental manner, this perspective aligns more closely with the ethos of the One Health paradigm. The paper presents examples of existing programs that benefit wild animals and could be broadened based on this idea. Next, it explains the kind of cross-disciplinary research framework-integrating animal welfare science, ecology, and other disciplines-needed to successfully develop effective ways to help wild animals. It then argues that the reasons to protect wild animal health also apply in the case of other ways to help wild animals. This is relevant especially in light of the very large scale of wild animal suffering.