The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

"The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" is a 2009 essay by American essayist Brian Tomasik that argues that wild animal suffering is large in scale and should receive ethical attention. It was first self-published online under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst" on his website Essays on Reducing Suffering, and later published in the academic journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015. The essay has also been republished and translated, including a French translation published in Les Cahiers antispécistes.

The essay argues that wild animals are far more numerous than animals on farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets, and that many experience suffering from natural processes including predation, fear of predators, disease and parasitism, hunger, cold, injury, and accidents; it discusses how reproductive strategies, population dynamics, and high juvenile mortality may affect the balance of suffering and happiness in nature. It also considers uncertainty about sentience and responds to objections to the claim that many wild lives may be net negative, while discussing ethical and practical questions about human intervention in ecosystems, proposing a research agenda aimed at reducing wild animal suffering, and considering scenarios in which future technologies could increase or reduce such suffering.

It has been summarised by Faunalytics and discussed by the Center on Long-Term Risk, and has been cited in academic and related literature on animal ethics, wild animal suffering, and welfare biology.