Wild animal suffering is the suffering experienced by nonhuman animals living outside of direct human control, due to harms such as disease, injury, parasitism, starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, weather conditions, natural disasters, and killings by other animals,[1][2] as well as psychological stress.[3] Some estimates indicate that the vast majority of individual animals in existence live in the wild.[4] A vast amount of natural suffering has been described as an unavoidable consequence of Darwinian evolution[5] and the pervasiveness of reproductive strategies which favor producing large numbers of offspring, with a low amount of parental care and of which only a small number survive to adulthood, the rest dying in painful ways, has led some to argue that suffering dominates happiness in nature.
