I sometimes see people claiming very confidently that wild-animal welfare is completely intractable and there are no cost-effective interventions we can do to improve wild animals’ welfare. (Exact implications of this claim generally depend on the speakers’ values.)
This is honestly a quite extraordinarily claim. Think of all the ways human beings affect wild animals already: bird feeders, wildlife tourism, hunting, pest control, failing to adequately secure our dumpsters, disease control, air and water pollution, climate change, outdoor pets, invasive species, and so on and so forth. Are you telling me that there is not literally one of the dozens of ways we affect wild animals that has a knowable positive or negative effect on them? Perhaps some deity with a particularly odd ethical system has cursed us to an eternal neutrality, such that every rat we kill humanely will cause another rat to die horribly of poison?
It is not difficult to find a counterexample to this claim. Wildlife tourism is bad for wildlife unless it is particularly carefully done; it is also often bad from a conservation perspective, although of course that depends on the counterfactual, since wildlife tourism is no doubt better for biodiversity than the land becoming a freeway. (If you wish to engage in wildlife tourism, try to find proprietors that follow responsible tourism guidelines.)
Sometimes “wild-animal welfare is completely intractable” is used in a specialized sense, to mean “I accept certain philosophical arguments that mean that wild-animal lives are not worth living, and I don’t think there’s anything humans can do to cause their lives to be worth living.” However, if you don’t think we should wipe out nature from the earth (which, in my experience, most people who accept those arguments don’t), it is still possible to make things better or worse for wild animals, and (if cost-effective) it may be desirable to do so even if wild-animal lives aren’t worth living.
It may also be used to mean “there are not any wild-animal suffering interventions that are comparable in cost-effectiveness to GiveWell top charities.” I would not be surprised if this were the case. But I’m not sure how anybody could know that.
This is not, to be clear, because ecosystems are somehow inherently unknowable. It is true that ecosystems are very complicated and anything you do can have a dozen knock-on effects you never predicted. But we do, in fact, reason about what actions to take about ecosystems, even given our great uncertainty. Many people solemnly say that it is impossible, simply impossible, to know the effects of any action on ecosystems and therefore it would be irresponsible to take any action to protect wild animals– and then they eat wild-caught fish. Or let their cat go outside. Or put up a bird feeder. Or donate money to the Nature Conservancy. If ecosystems are so damn unpredictable how do you know that nature preserves are a good way of preserving biodiversity anyway? Maybe things would be even more biodiverse if we cut down every tree in the rainforest!
The answer to this claim is that while of course ecosystems are dynamic and unpredictable systems and it is impossible to state with literally 100% certainty that cutting down the entire rainforest would be a bad conservation strategy, we do possess things like “nonzero level of knowledge about ecology” and “common fucking sense” that point to destroying their habitat being a poor way of protecting endangered species. Similarly, while there are tragic and costly mistakes, we can mostly figure out optimum sustainable yields for fisheries; most of the problem is in getting people to follow them instead of fishing as much as they damn well please. It is possible to know things about complicated systems with sufficient certainty that action is a better idea than nonaction.
The problem is that the wild-animal welfare space includes maybe a dozen people, nearly all of whom are dividing their time between wild-animal suffering and something else. As far as I know exactly one of us is a biologist; most people who do research about wild animal suffering are, by training, philosophers, social scientists, or programmers.
To be clear, this is a really terrible state of affairs. I as much as anyone want wild-animal suffering research to be done by people who have any discernible expertise in the field whatsoever. In my ideal world the field would consist of conservation biologists, wildlife managers, ecologists, ethologists and other people who can apply their academic knowledge to the question of improving wild animal welfare. However, this is somewhat difficult, because (a) only a few thousand people have heard of the concept of caring about wild animals’ welfare at all and (b) very very few scientists want to work part-time for minimum wage.
(If I have any biologists reading this blog who are sympathetic to the idea that Wild Animal Lives Matter, please email me.)
GiveWell benefited from a lot of development economics and public health research; they had to synthesize the fields, which is– to be clear– very important and very complicated, but once they did they could state their conclusions with a good deal of rigor. Animal Charity Evaluators is on shakier ground because academics tend not to find “how do we best make people vegan?” an interesting question, but at least they could benefit from decades of research about factory-farm conditions. Wild-animal welfare is a completely new field. The knowledge we need often exists– scattered across epidemiology, wildlife management, ecology, and a dozen other fields– but no one has ever collected it and applied it seriously to the issue of wild-animal welfare. It would take years simply to collect what is currently known, much less do any original research or begin to make intervention recommendations with reasonable cost-effectiveness numbers attached.
For most possible interventions– disease control, predator control, wildlife contraception, supplemental feeding, and so on–we don’t even know whether doing the thing would be good or bad. Again, not because it’s unknowable; just because there’s a limited amount you can do with twelve nonexperts working part time.
It is very easy to slide from “we do not know this” to “this is in principle unknowable and it is a waste of time to research it.” But resist the urge. Just because we don’t know something right now is no reason not to spend time trying to figure it out.
arbitrary_greay said:
Counterpoint: the effective thing to do at this point is to keep picking the low-hanging fruit that still exists. It may not necessarily be a “waste” of time to research these things, but they’re sufficiently complex that the resources could be better spent on things where the solutions could be more easily divined, aka more bang for the buck.
Isn’t this why EA has shyed away from throwing money at systemic solutions in the first place?
There have been low-resource-cost ecosystem studies, like on how feeding the birds in the park is bad. If wild animal intervention studies had the PR to focus on those kinds of things (the obvious low hanging fruit that still exists!), rather than abstract concepts of suffering and util and whatnot, not only would it be on the face more effective in the traditional sense, it would be also easier to sway people to the cause.
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Fisher said:
If you want to preserve wildlife, make them worth preserving.
There are lions in the wild today because it is legal to hunt them, and that license generates a vast amount of money (relative to the local economy). If there was a ban on lion hunting, their fate would be like that of wolves in North America, because people do not like living next to predators.
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LeeEsq said:
On the other hand, people had no problem hunting big mega fauna close to extension for fun previously. The late 19th and early 20th century big game hunters, weren’t that up on conservation for future generations of hunters. The monetize everything solution has a problem that humans can be extraordinarily short sighted at times.
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Fisher said:
There’s also the added benefit that a hunter’s bullet is probably a much faster and painless way to die than many natural deaths.
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LeeEsq said:
Getting humans en mass to agree that large swathes of the planet should be left untouched for the benefit of wild animals and plants seems to be an exercise in frustration. You save places from exploitation and development by at least promising that humans can see the wilds in all their beauty. This includes getting to see wild animals outside a zoo.
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Fisher said:
Leaving areas untouched is not necessarily to the “benefit” of animals, in regards to reducing their suffering.
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Raininginsanity said:
Normally I wouldn’t comment, but I actually have something relevant to this topic.
Some gorillas have figured out how to destroy traps by poachers or what have you. Great news right? What is the reaction of the people studying the gorillas?
>”If we could get more of them doing it, it would be great,” he joked.
>Karisoke’s Vecellio, though, said actively instructing the apes would be against the center’s ethos.
>”No we can’t teach them,” she said. “We try as much as we can to not interfere with the gorillas. We don’t want to affect their natural behavior.”
Our scientists are trekkies. The prime directive rules. Speaker for the Dead lies forgotten in the dust.
https://www.google.com/amp/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/news/2012/07/120719-young-gorillas-juvenile-traps-snares-rwanda-science-fossey
There is more than a couple of barriers to getting people to care about wild animal life.
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pansnarrans said:
“It is not difficult to find a counterexample to this claim. Wildlife tourism is bad for wildlife unless it is particularly carefully done; it is also often bad from a conservation perspective, although of course that depends on the counterfactual, since wildlife tourism is no doubt better for biodiversity than the land becoming a freeway.”
Interesting. So, given that wildlife tourism exists already, would it be ethical or unethical for me to be a wildlife tourist? Also, would be it more or less ethical than me being a “spending a week on a Greek island” tourist?
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EGI said:
(Biologist who is sympathetic to the idea that Wild Animal Lives Matter here. Though probably the wrong kind of biologist – no ecology credentials).
I think the notion that wild animal suffering is completely intractable has less to do with the idea that we cannot predict ecosystems at all, and more with the problem that we have basically no idea which species experience qualia (are sentient, have moral significance) and even if that were solved what does or does not constitute a life worth living for those species.
Even if those questions were solved I do not think that we could provide a significant fraction of these animals with enough resources to live a comfortable life AND basically 100% effective contraception AND manage a breeding program for all these species to prevent both population collapse and dysgenic shifts in the gene pool. Heck, we can’t even do that for our own species…
Except for some measures on the margins like abolishing especially painful means of pest control and similar things, I think the only kinda sorta actionable plan would be intentional ecosystem destruction if you subscribe to the notion that most wild animal lifes are not worth living. This has a lot of other negative knock on effects (including diminished ecosystem services for humans) and is a much to permanent solution before the above questions are answered WAY more conclusively. Also to quote Eliezer: If your proposed program sounds like something the Rebel Alliance has to fly a daring fighter raid to blow up before it can be activated, consider you might be the bad guy.
Considering this I think caring about wild animal suffering mostly collapses back into the old transhumanist mantra: “We have to work faster!”, because we need to be much more powerful than we are to really do something about this, though I would love to be convinced otherwise…
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sconn said:
I think you can’t get anywhere with wild animal suffering unless you know if you’re a positive or a negative utilitarian. (And perhaps even then?) You can stop all wild animal suffering by wiping out all animals. You could do it with contraception or you could do it with bullets, but you can stop the suffering.
However if you think it’s a positive good for animals to exist at all — and presumably for each type of animal to exist at all — then you’re faced with almost infinite numbers of moral dilemmas: this animal vs. that animal, freedom vs. security, longer life vs. happier life. We make these decisions for ourselves, but not everyone decides the same, so it’s impossible to predict what the animal would choose if they had the ability to decide.
I already have enough of a moral dilemma over whether I should let the cat go outside — where she’d surely be happier and get to enjoy more of what a “good life” consists of for cats, like climbing trees and stalking and socializing with other cats — or keep her inside, where she will live maybe five times as long. How can I make that decision for another being?
I keep the cat in. It’s mainly out of selfishness. I like my cat where she is available for me to pet her, and luckily this time around I have a cat who doesn’t seem too distressed by the inside life. I’ve had cats who couldn’t handle indoor life, to the point of becoming neurotic, and eventually I caved and let them out, where they lived a happy short life and then were killed by predators or hit by cars. But multiply that pretty much undecidable moral dilemma by billions and then you see the extent of the problem. I’m not sure there is a “right answer.”
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