Completed Plants, Animals & Ecology Food & Agriculture

From 'Feed the Birds' to 'Do Not Feed the Animals'

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations National Museums Scotland · University of Exeter · University of Reading Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.5M
Period May 2020 — May 2024

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

People in Britain put out millions of tonnes of bird food each year, let their cats roam to hunt, and buy bags of treats for zoo animals—and this project argues that these everyday acts are quietly reshaping the biology and health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. The problem is that animal feeding is usually studied in isolation: ecologists look at bird feeders, vets look at pet diets, and historians look at past customs. No one has connected these dots. This matters because feeding decisions that seem harmless—like leaving scraps for foxes or fat balls for garden birds—can alter disease transmission, shift animal behaviour, and even drive evolutionary changes. The BSE outbreak, which jumped from livestock to pets to zoo animals to humans, shows how catastrophic the unintended consequences can be. This project will trace the history and biology of feeding birds, cats, and zoo animals in Britain from 500 BC to the present, using a shared concept called commensalism—where one species benefits without harming the other. If successful, it could reshape public health guidance, conservation policy, and urban planning by revealing how a seemingly trivial human habit links animal welfare, biodiversity loss, and pandemic risk.

View original technical description
Humans have a deep-seared proclivity to feed animals, a behaviour implicated in the origins of animal domestication (the Commensal Pathway to domestication). While animal domestication is widely considered a phenomenon of the deep human past, our hypothesis is that the process is not only continuing but accelerating. Today, humans are feeding wildlife, pets and captive animals at unprecedented levels. This exceptional human intervention has ramifications for global health. However, the situation is complex and beyond the comprehension of any single discipline. This is because while animal-feeding decisions are cultural, with deep histories that reflect political-economy, identities and attitudes to the natural world, their impacts are biological and evolutionary, affecting behavioural ecologies, biodiversity and well-being. The interconnected nature of animal-feeding and how decisions can have catastrophic effects on the health of all concerned is exemplified by the BSE outbreak, which manifested across livestock, pets, zoo animals and humans alike. This One Health project will use a transdisciplinary ‘engaged research’ methodology to explore the drivers and consequences of animal feeding in Britain (500BC to the present). Through the shared conceptual lens of commensalism we will examine how bird-feeding, cat-feeding and zoo-animal feeding are shaping our collective futures.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Andrew Kitchener (EPMC Awardee)Angela Cassidy (EPMC Awardee)Garry Marvin (EPMC Awardee)Naomi Sykes (EPMC Awardee)Stuart Black (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

The ecology of behavioural contagion in natural systems
The social dynamics of cultural behaviour: transmission biases and adaptive social learning strategies in wild great tits.
Ancient Zoo: Parasite diversity and zoonotic events in ancient Britain (OneZoo CDT)
How does supplemental feeding effect demography and reproductive fitness in endangered bird species on Mauritius?"
Species loss and the ecology of human-animal health: Understanding and preventing extinction in the twentieth century and beyond.

Original classification

Collaborative Award in H&SS

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.