[All views are my own and are not those of my employer.]
I think that animals matter morally, and I think that wild animals matter as much as domestic animals do. These are pretty controversial statements, but they’d take many blog posts to address, so I’m mostly going to be talking to an audience that agrees with me about both points.
One common objection I want to examine a little more closely is the “naturalness” objection– that it is ill-advised to interfere with the natural order of things, perhaps because there may be consequences that you are not capable of foreseeing. It’s true that interactions with nature often have unforeseen consequences. If you let your fertilizer run off into a lake, snails will have more to eat; the snails are a secondary host for a parasite that infects frogs; the parasite causes leg deformities in frogs. You wouldn’t guess that one of the consequences of fertilizing your crops is deformed frogs, but in reality it is.
The problem with this objection is that all landscapes are touched by humanity. The heaths of Scotland are a product of human intervention going back thousands of years. Human beings in the Pleistocene played a vitally important role (along with climate change) in the extinction of megafauna such as the mammoth. To get these ecosystems to return to an untouched state, one would have to wind back the clock not decades but millennia.
Furthermore, today in the United States, if something is untouched wilderness, it’s untouched wilderness because someone decided that that particular tract of land needed to be untouched wilderness and another tract over there could be safely transformed into condominiums. Natural parks and reserves are usually managed to allow outdoor recreation like hunting, fishing, wildlife photography, and hiking; national forests often allow logging and livestock grazing. And of course all areas– not matter how untouched– are affected by climate change, pollution, and other global changes that humans have wrought.
There just isn’t a natural wilderness unaffected by humans. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense to argue about whether it would be a good idea to leave untouched wilderness alone, because there isn’t any. Because of our power, humans are already the stewards of nature. The only question is whether we will care about our charges’ happiness or neglect them. And the same management principles that are used to handle things like eutrophication can be used to handle issues of wild-animal suffering as well.
Unlike many anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates, I currently do not support destroying habitat. Partially, this is because I am not sure whether I care about insects. If you think insects are sufficiently morally important, there is an open-and-shut case for habitat destruction, because insect lives suck a lot and they are too tiny and numerous to manage. Since I have a high degree of uncertainty about whether they matter at all, and I wouldn’t care about them very much even if they did matter, I don’t view this as an open-and-shut argument.
I am very uncertain about the quality of life of the average wild bird or mammal. On one hand, they typically experience disease, fear, stress, and a painful death. On the other hand, they get a lot of opportunities to explore, play, engage in social interaction, and perform natural behaviors. I don’t think anyone really knows for certain; it’s simply not been studied enough. I’m also uncertain about the quality of life of the average bird or mammal, given predator removal, addition of food during winters or famines, population management through contraceptives or pain-minimizing hunting, vaccination programs, etc. With an ecologically informed, humane management strategy, is it possible to make wild animal lives worth living in a cost-effective way? I’m not sure.
Humans get a lot of benefits from the continued existence of wild ecosystems, ranging from wild food to climate regulation to their aesthetic value. These benefits disproportionately affect the global poor, who are more likely to eat bushmeat, more likely to be victims of climate change, and who get to look at nature like all the time. I am concerned that habitat destruction will cause grave harm to human beings. (This is a really good paper about the economic and well-being consequences of environmental damage, and I encourage interested people to read it.)
I am concerned about the effects of habitat destruction on currently existing animals. Habitat destruction often hurts the animals that live in the habitat: being burned alive because someone is doing slash-and-burn agriculture on your forest is not a pleasant death. Among animals who live in new, smaller habitats, there are edge effects, which are often harmful to the animal: for instance, edge effects increase the risk of fires in the Amazon rainforest, and they can also make animals more vulnerable to predation.
It is difficult to undestroy a habitat: once a species is extinct, it’s gone; a sufficiently small species will often go extinct even if conservation efforts are made to preserve it; destroying a habitat may involve physical changes that are difficult to reverse; many habitats are a product of decades if not centuries of succession which would have to be repeated. For this reason, I feel it is best to err on the side of not destroying habitat.
I think that in the long term the right attitude for anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates is something like conservation biology. Conservation biology successfully shifted US land management policy from “we care about things that benefit humans, like timber and hunting” to “we care about things that benefit humans AND biodiversity.” I think the end game for anti-wild-animal-suffering advocacy is to shift it to “we care about things that benefit humans AND biodiversity AND the wellbeing of the animals under our care.”
I think this might be the least difficult sell from a public-relations perspective. I think it triggers the whole “leave nature alone” intuition less if we advocate for the well-being of animals to be considered as part of land management, that is, in decisions about nature that humans are already making. I also think that this might enable us to ally more closely with hunters. Assuming that a hunter’s bullet is one of the least painful ways to die (which is not always true, but often is), anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates should promote a massive increase in hunting. Hunters also support some policies, such as providing supplemental food during winters, which conservationists typically disapprove of and which anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates might like.
I also think it might be one of the most effective ways of using activist dollars to help wild animals without destroying habitat, because we’d be focusing on changing the way that the US government spends its money. A single lobbying dollar can influence many more dollars of US government spending.
I have only looked into the history of conservation biology a little bit, but I think one of the key points of their success is combining activist energy with mainstream academic credibility. Conservation biology, in its early days, had many tenured professors whose research had had a lot of influence on the science of ecology, such as E. O. Wilson. Anti-wild-animal-suffering advocacy is distinctly lacking in academic credibility; the few academics interested in it are usually in unrelated fields like economics (Tyler Cowen, Yew-Kwang Ng) or philosophy (Oscar Horta). This is not only a problem for our ability to influence policymakers but also for our ability to understand what we want to influence them to do, which would probably involve a lot of careful ecological research that simply isn’t being performed.
Unfortunately, it may be more difficult to get biologists to be interested in animal welfare than it is in biodiversity, because the loss of biodiversity is a direct threat to the thing they’re studying. Nevertheless, I think that outreach to academic biologists is quite important. I also suggest that students who care about wild animal suffering and have an interest in biology strongly consider a career as an academic biologist specializing in wild-animal welfare.
Thing of Things 
I’ve never understood why it is that, in the context of wild-animal suffering, people are so willing to write off large groups of animals’ lives as plausibly-not-worth-living. It’s one thing in the case of factory farming, but with wild animals (and insects, and so on), I just don’t see it. Granted, their lives tend not to appear particularly desirable to humans, but they’re not humans, and I would expect their mental architecture to be well-adapted to wild-animaling in much the same way that human minds are well-adapted to hunter-gathering. Is there some additional factor I’m missing which justifies the seemingly-excessive odds people put on the hypothesis that that’s not the case and that they actually are suffering enough that not-existing would be better for them than existing?
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Evolution doesn’t select for happiness. You can be miserable and excellent at surviving to reproduce, so that’s not a good a priori reason to suppose animals enjoy themselves.
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Does evolution really not select for happiness, though? Empirically, humanity ended up being pretty happy with life in their evolutionary niche. That, to me, suggests either (1) that evolution selects for something that correlates with happiness even if it’s not directly happiness itself, or (2) that humans happened to have a tendency towards happiness in our niche despite its lack of either evolutionary value or correlation therewith. And while 2 is certainly a possibility, it strikes me as much less plausible than 1, especially after taking into account the additional implausible-given-2-but-plausible-given-1 coincidence of humanity being capable of happiness at all in spite of its lack of direct reproductive value.
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Are you talking about how we’re happy now? Because we have a lot of stuff these days that make our lives much better than they were. Or are you claiming that we have evidence that humans were happy in the the actual evolutionary environment?
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Also, by complete coincidence, I just happened to see this article which lays out an argument at the start for happiness being a temporary state that is evolutionarily useful as a mechanism of positive reinforcement for reproductively advantageous behaviour.
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https://balioc.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/am-i-truly-mardukth/
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I’m not talking about how we (i.e. well-off humans with internet access) are happy now; I’m talking about how hunter-gatherers are happy, despite not having most of the stuff we have. And while it’s true that the hunter-gatherers we’re able to interview live on islands rather than on mainland Africa, and that is to some extent a deviation from our evolutionary environment, my understanding of their lifestyle is that it’s reasonably similar to historical mainland-Africa lifestyles, such that I would expect similar levels of happiness.
That article was an interesting read. I find its story about the evolutionary value of happiness pretty plausible. However, I don’t think it implies that people are net unhappy most of the time; infrequent-but-intense bursts of happiness can easily override more-frequent-but-less-intense discomforts for purposes of getting above-zero total happiness.
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Oh, huh. I completely forgot that hunter-gatherers still exist and are available for interview. Fair enough.
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I said something like this a couple threads ago, but if you grant these moral priori, shouldn’t we just genetically engineer dung beetles to have happier lives?
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Theoretically, yes, but in practice it is really really difficult to genetically engineer happy dung beetles.
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“Is there some additional factor I’m missing which justifies the seemingly-excessive odds people put on the hypothesis that that’s not the case and that they actually are suffering enough that not-existing would be better for them than existing?”
The biggest promoters of this are negative utilitarians (of various flavors) who don’t much care about well-being, only suffering. Even if the wild animals had lives worth living by the animals’ standards, with substantially more happiness than suffering, they’d still prefer to destroy them. If you don’t know this, it can give the impression of great certainty that the lives of wild animals aren’t worth living in a normal sense, and I think biases the discourse. [This is one of my pet peeves.]
Those who want to help animals overall (rather than reducing suffering even at the expense of making them worse-off) do have to wrestle with the issue and are accordingly less enthusiastic about habitat destruction without replacement by something better and positively good.
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Biology postgrad with an interest in wild animal suffering here. I’ll try to keep this in mind.
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“There just isn’t a natural wilderness unaffected by humans. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense to argue about whether it would be a good idea to leave untouched wilderness alone, because there isn’t any.”
IDK that most conservation advocates would see this as an all-or-nothing thing, and would instead strive to minimize human intervention in the natural world, positive or negative.
“With an ecologically informed, humane management strategy, is it possible to make wild animal lives worth living in a cost-effective way?”
Never been much for this “life worth living” stuff, especially with respect to entities that can’t affective forecast or communicate super well. Maybe with substantially better understanding of cognition and neurology we’ll someday be able to scan in someone’s preferences and go from there, but for now it seems better to look for simple, unilateral improvements (e.g. using well understood pesticides that cause relatively little unpleasantness, all else being equal, over ones that cause more, for a certain value of equal). And it’s certainly an easier sell! But I also come at this with a seemingly far greater tolerance for my own pain and suffering and a far greater desire to accomplish things in the world than others in this discussion (e.g. see all the ink on how much of your own flourishing you’d need to experience in exchange for some amount or probability of lava submersion or w/e). And OFC this question is at least somewhat unavoidable when it comes to that one truly serious philosophical problem — euthanasia.
“many habitats are a product of decades if not centuries of succession which would have to be repeated”
Eh. Maybe it’s my background in deep-timey-type stuff, but I think I’ll need at least a few million years of necessary recovery before I recoil in shock. Plus, human cultivation can help here — we can tend gardens, reintroduce extirpated taxa, etc. And while it is tricky to resurrect extinct species, I’m confident we’ll soon (~next few decades) be able to come close, or to at least recreate a good enough duplicate (and I’ve long been an advocate of a genomic Noah’s Ark for that purpose, nevermind the others — but more to capture existing genetic diversity, since it’s not that hard to extract and sequence stuff from e.g. museum specimens).
“anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates should promote a massive increase in hunting”
in the short term, maybe but could also introduce unfortunate downstream effects (though greater hunting normalization). I guess it’s pretty tractable though. Still, far less desirable to me than some sort of immunocontraception (for fertility/population regulation) plus the occasional (painless) euthanization. And there’s the tricky bit where hunters intentionally inflate prey populations in order to be able to kill more of them (e.g. “The agencies bolster the deer population through tactics like clear-cutting sections of forests to create the edge habitat that deer prefer, and leasing land to farmers while requiring the farmers to plant extra crops to feed the deer.” (from http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/27/hunting-isnt-the-answer-to-animal-pests/ after a quick google)). Also this seems pretty adjacent to the “habitat destruction” point.
“Unfortunately, it may be more difficult to get biologists to be interested in animal welfare than it is in biodiversity, because the loss of biodiversity is a direct threat to the thing they’re studying. Nevertheless, I think that outreach to academic biologists is quite important. I also suggest that students who care about wild animal suffering and have an interest in biology strongly consider a career as an academic biologist specializing in wild-animal welfare.”
I’ve gotten a decent number of sympathetic responses whenever I raise WAS ideas in discussions of conservation (usually framed as striking a balance between animal welfare and various ecosystem services per each of our personal sets of values) and have directed plenty hopeful students to something similar, so agreed! Trouble I see, though, is that it would be hard to make a career for oneself advocating for RWAS from the outset — you’d get a lot of pushback from journals, conference organizers, other academics on your tenure review board, etc. Easier to work in a related field (e.g. mostly mainstream conservation) and then pivot once decently established. That’s what I might do if I end up going full-academia.
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Your link to the “really good paper about the economic and well-being consequences of environmental damage” actually just links to the paper about megafauna extinction.
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Whoops, fixed.
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with proper wildlife management. Otherwise many would starve and be brought down predators, who do need to eat too, and just simply cannot go yo Mackey d’s or Krogers natural, yet scary to them as well. We anthropormophicize way too much. Their minds are different. I do not believe in abuse at sell. We’re the adults here. They rely on our leadership. Even if it kills them. I think they understand that. To some weird degree. We’re animals too. We get it as well. To some degree. We are more sentient so choose to not to like to acknowledge it.
I don’t hunt. I don’t care if others do. I don’t because I don’t like the taste of the animal in the wild I kill. And I’d only kill it if I wanted yo eat it. It’s as simple as that.
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I know this is not the idea of the article, but I am amused that one could mangle this into “Fight wild-animal suffering: Donate today to the NRA!”.
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The ultimate problem is sheer numbers, and weighting of suffering. Imagine if you treat toad life as worthwhile, including tadpoles. Many species of toad will have literally thousands of tadpoles; large species like cane toads have been recorded laying 10,000 eggs in a single strand in one night (and they will do this severa times a year if they have the calories). And any given spring pond may attract dozens or hundreds of breeding toads. Even if a single toad is worth 0.1% of a deer, the sheer, colossal numbers of toads will dictate that their welfare overrides any concern at all for deer.
And this is far from unique to toads. Most non-biologists have a very poor understanding of just how little of any given ecosystem is mammals and birds. Invertebrates always occupy the top spots in biomass, number of species, and total numbers, but even if you exclude them, huge fractions of biomass and individual numbers are species you never see, and almost all of them are r-selected species which produce vast numbers of offspring with poor survival odds. Most people don’t realize this because a) those species are often small and hidden and b) most First World people live in areas with cold climates and consequently very low biodiversity which is uncharacteristically heavy on warm-blooded species compared to the rest of the world. You could suddenly wipe out every mammal and bird on Earth, and the resulting disruption would probably fail to live up to even some of the lesser mass extinctions (after all, both are only ~200 million years old, versus about 550 for multicellular life).
Any attempt to unite utilitarianism with wild animal suffering will inevitably result in either the total dominance of the interests of the fastest-reproducing, most-numerous species in the ecosystem, or an unworkable and arbitrary series of post-hoc weightings to avoid the inevitable conclusion that we should kill all the tigers to make toad-breeding pools.
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This kind of argument makes the prospect of superhuman AI really scary…
I, for one, welcome our amphibious overlords!
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There are a couple factors that don’t make such a unity as dire as you seem to think:
First, most Singerian utilitarian systems treat simple animals differently from humans. Because humans are self-aware, have other desires than just happiness, and can form future plans, their death is treated as having moral weight. This is because it thwarts any future plans humans might have, and erases a unique self-awareness. The vast majority of animals lack such complex preferences, so weight is only given to their suffering and happiness.
This means that since the majority of tadpoles and other k-selected juveniles die fairly quickly, and make sure those that survive to adulthood are fairly happy, but they otherwise aren’t morally a big deal. Utilitarians should make efforts to make sure their deaths are as painless as possible, but can otherwise safely ignore them.
Secondly, people already seem to have moral intuitions about animal existence that give weight to different species. We seem to think its good that animal species continue to exist, but don’t feel the need to artificially inflate their population unless they serve some specific purpose. I don’t think crystallizing and formalizing these intuitions would be that ad-hoc.
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The entire idea of habitat destruction as a way to fight wild animal suffering is mind-boggling (in a bad way) to me, and even more so that it seems to be such a commonly accepted idea in circles that care about it. I am not a utilitarian (and also feel pretty strongly about the importance of preserving biodiversity), but even from that standpoint I can’t see how it’s considered a remotely acceptable answer to the problem. As far as I can see, it’s the same kind of logic as “destroy the village in order to save it”, or deciding that the most morally correct course of action is to destroy all life on Earth in order to end ALL suffering (and if one accepts the sort of negative utilitarianism which leads to the viewpoint that habitat destruction is a morally positive action, what stops one from arriving at that conclusion?) To me, it just seems like the sort of belief system normally associated with cartoon supervillains, and I think one should probably rethink one’s moral system if one ends up at that point. (To put it mildly.)
Part of the thing is, for all that we don’t understand animal consciousness that well and thus can’t say much about what a wild animal’s quality of life is like (as this post discusses), all that I’ve learned and observed leaves me pretty strongly convinced that wild animals would rather be alive than dead, in just the way (and for much the same reasons) that the vast majority of humans would. If we respect animals as moral agents enough to care about their suffering, shouldn’t that mean respect for that, as well? Shouldn’t we see the idea of killing them to save them from suffering (regardless of what they might want) as being as repugnant an idea as if we applied it to humans?
(My view of the entire issue is that we do not currently have either the degree of technology or the understanding of animal consciousness that would be necessary in order to do anything about wild animal suffering in any real way, and that the point where we might have both of those is very, very far off, to the point where I’m pretty skeptical that we ever will. If we ever do, the question can be revisited at that point, but “kill them to save them from suffering” is, IMO, a completely unacceptable answer on every single level. I’m in agreement with most of the points this post makes, and I’m completely for an approach that synthesizes a desire to reduce wild animal suffering with a respect for biodiversity and efforts to preserve natural habitats- but in the end, it’s a problem that’s way, way beyond human capabilities to solve, at this point in time, and IMO should be viewed accordingly.)
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“One common objection I want to examine a little more closely is the “naturalness” objection..”
I don’t see how this doesn’t apply to all forms of suffering, including human suffering. Are we supposed to just let flood or hurricane victims just go hang because that’s all natural? For that matter, there’s nothing unnatural about human predation on other humans, so even that suffering falls under this.
“I think that animals matter morally, and I think that wild animals matter as much as domestic animals do. These are pretty controversial statements, ”
Oh, fuck that. The idea that this is controversial is indecent.
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I agree that they *shouldn’t* be controversial but they are, in fact, controversial. 😛
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