Grants FAQ

We define a wild animal as any free-ranging individual animal living outside of human control. This includes animals living freely in human-dominated environments, such as parks and urban spaces, but excludes those raised as pets, on farms, in zoos, or in laboratories, regardless of their species.

The aggregate quality of an individual’s subjective experiences. This can also be called “well-being” or “quality of life.” We use “improving welfare” interchangeably with “reducing or preventing suffering.” See here for further explanation.

Projects must be led by a principal investigator who is affiliated with a research institution. Applicants from any country that is eligible to receive funding from a US donor are welcome to apply. (You might wish to consult this list of United States sanctions, which provides some guidance on ineligible countries.) Anyone is eligible who meets these criteria and has the expertise and experience required to lead the proposed project.

With suitable justification, funding from Wild Animal Initiative may be applied toward:

• Tuition, student fees, stipends, or salaries. This may include benefits such as health insurance.

• Administrative costs (e.g. publication fees) and travel expenses directly related to your project. But please note, Wild Animal Initiative funding cannot be used to cover institutional overhead.

• Equipment required exclusively for the project. The cost of any durable goods that would outlast the project, such as computers and other laboratory infrastructure, should not exceed 25% of the total budget and must be clearly justified.

We would consider providing partial funding for a project. You should clearly demonstrate how the additional funding from Wild Animal Initiative would contribute to any existing project, emphasizing the wild animal welfare relevance. If funding from other sources is not already secured, you should show how you intend to obtain the additional funds required to complete the project. You should also note what contingency plans you have in place if you do not receive additional funds (e.g. downsizing the project).

Yes. You can request full funds or partial funds that contribute to a larger study, as long as the wild animal welfare component is clearly articulated. Adding a welfare component to an existing study is also encouraged. Co-funding, while not required, can increase your chances of receiving funding to the extent that it reduces the budget amount requested from Wild Animal Initiative for your project and allows us to target resources toward the most wild animal welfare-relevant activities. We are especially keen to receive proposals that will support welfare-focused objectives for projects with co-funding for project setup and less welfare-focused activities, such as basic ecology. As with all projects, the proposed activities must perform well against our selection criteria and meet our ethical standards.

You can submit expressions of interest for as many projects as you like, but we will select no more than one expression of interest per principal investigator to invite to the full proposal stage. You may serve as a collaborator on other projects, though.

You may apply as a team of collaborators, but we will ask you to identify a lead applicant. The lead applicant, or their institution, will be the official grantee in the event that your proposal is accepted. The grantee or their institution will need to assume responsibility for disbursing funds among collaborators.

We expect that for most projects the lead applicant will also be the principal investigator, but this is not required. For example, students may wish to be the lead applicant for a grant to support their project, while listing their supervisor as principal investigator, or vice versa. Both roles must be clearly identified in your expression of interest form.

You can choose whichever is best for you and your project. Keep in mind that some institutions have restrictions on employees accepting external grants. Note also that we do not cover institutional overhead (indirect costs [a.k.a. IDC], lab rental costs, etc.). If you choose to accept a grant as an individual, you may be liable to pay income tax in your country on the full amount. If you accept it through your institution, it is likely that only the funds received into your personal account (e.g. as stipend/salary) will be taxable. We are unable to provide tax advice, but recommend consulting a tax professional to ensure you understand your tax liability. In particular, you might need to consider a tax treaty between your country and the United States.

We will consider field studies, lab studies, and desk studies — including those that focus on theoretical impacts for wild animal welfare — as long as the benefits to wild animal welfare are clearly articulated and the project meets our other criteria for selection.

You should plan to begin your project within one year of our decision to fund your proposal. Challenge Grant projects should be completed within five years, while Seed Grant projects should be completed within two years. All projects should have a duration of at least six months.

Projects focusing on endangered species are eligible, but not encouraged. Our selection criteria consider the number of individuals that could benefit from the project and the neglectedness of the research area, and a project that is exclusively beneficial to an endangered species might not score well against either of those criteria. Endangered species are often represented by relatively few individuals in the wild, and also attract research attention for the purpose of biodiversity conservation. We do fund certain projects focusing on species of conservation concern if those projects aim to develop new methods or insights that are highly transferable to more numerous taxa. We will also consider funding projects that take advantage of unique opportunities that may be conferred by studying a particular species to improve understanding of welfare. For example, this could be a project that accesses large historic datasets that include welfare metrics or detailed biographical knowledge of every individual, which offers unique, generalizable insights that would not be possible for more numerous but often less well studied taxa.

Your project could involve the study of harms caused by humans, but you should carefully review our selection criteria that consider the number of individuals that will be benefitted by the project and the neglectedness of the research area. Human-wildlife conflict typically attracts more attention than issues that involve only wild animals, and therefore will be less neglected. Among projects focused on human-caused harms, we are more interested in those that focus on indirect or unintentional sources of harm that tend to receive less attention and interact in complex ways with natural ecological dynamics. Examples include light and noise pollution, and the impacts of roads, especially on smaller, more numerous animals.

Yes, if you can clearly demonstrate the relevance of your project to understanding the welfare of individual animals in wild environments. All other selection criteria must also be considered, and ethical guidelines must be strictly followed.

Studies that bring wild animals into captivity are discouraged, but we might consider funding such a project if it can be clearly demonstrated that there is no viable alternative method and that the project results stand to benefit a large number of individuals. We encourage applicants who are concerned about ethical aspects of their project to contact us for feedback early in the application process, and review our animal ethics guidelines.

Research methods that may cause animal suffering or result in death are discouraged and generally not funded. On a case-by-case basis, we might consider funding projects that aim to validate alternative methods against invasive or lethal methods that are already being used in non-Wild Animal Initiative funded studies. We encourage interested applicants to contact us to discuss specific projects.

For general guidance, please refer to the 3Rs Principles. You can also read Wild Animal Initiative’s animal ethics guidelines.

Generally, no. But if you can demonstrate clear welfare benefits to wild animals that would result from your project, it might be considered. You can contact us to discuss an individual project if you’re uncertain.

Please consult our Roadmap to see our plans for future calls. In general, Each year, we expect to announce one call for proposals annually for each of our programs — Seed Grants, Discovery Grants, and Challenge Grants. You can also subscribe to our listserv or newsletter and follow us on social media to be notified of future calls.

This varies from round to round, but historically around 10% of expressions of interest to the Seed Grants program and around 30% of Challenge Grants expressions of interest have been invited to submit full proposals. We aim to respect the time of our staff, our external reviewers, and our applicants by avoiding situations where a lot of work goes into writing and reviewing a full proposal that is not competitive.

Applicants invited to submit a full proposal will receive a template. The template includes open-ended questions with guidance for length of each response. Applicants should provide sufficient information to clearly articulate a response to each question. We recommend keeping your responses as succinct as possible and close to the word counts recommended, but please note that they are suggestions for guidance and do not need to be followed strictly if you feel you need more space to explain something.

This varies from round to round, but we generally expect to fund around 20% to 30% of the full proposals we receive. In some cases, we offer partial funding for a project's most welfare-relevant objectives, or we offer to fund a pilot of a proposed project, or to develop proof-of-concept.

Yes. It is crucial that your project be scientifically sound, and that is often easier to accomplish while focusing on a single species. But once scientific validity is established, relevance to a large number of wild animals is one of the most important things we consider, and considering multiple species can be a good way to accomplish this.

The project itself does not need to directly impact the welfare of any individuals, but the proposal should at least articulate how the results could eventually inform actions to improve the welfare of a large number of individuals. As long as the study can demonstrate broader relevance to a large number of individuals — including those potentially belonging to other populations or species — your study subjects can be as few or as many as required to carry out the study with scientific rigor. In fact, we encourage applicants to consider reducing the number of animals used in their research to the minimum number of subjects viable for successfully addressing the hypotheses.

Yes. You can apply to any future calls for proposals with your project, as long as it is relevant to the call’s theme. The likelihood of your application’s success will be increased if you address any weaknesses identified upon first submission. We allow and even encourage resubmission because funding constraints mean that we sometimes have to reject otherwise valuable projects that might have received funding if they were being compared with different projects or being considered under a different theme. We also recognize that wild animal welfare is a relatively new research area, and it can be hard to articulate objectives clearly and appropriately. If an applicant is generally interested in studying wild animal welfare, we are happy to advise them on ways to improve their proposals and make them more focused on wild animal welfare from one round to the next.