#56 – Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that

Elephants in chains at travelling circuses; pregnant pigs trapped in coffin-sized crates at factory farms; deers living in the wild. We should welcome the last as a pleasant break from the horror, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. While we tend to have a romanticised view of nature, life in the wild includes a range of extremely negative experiences.

Most animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant lest they be killed, and perhaps experience the terror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases and injuries are never treated. In winter wild animals freeze to death and in droughts they die of heat or thirst.

There are fewer than 20 people in the world dedicating their lives to researching these problems.

But according to Persis Eskander, researcher at Open Philanthropy, if we sum up the negative experiences of all wild animals, their sheer number – trillions to quintillions, depending on which you count – could make the scale of the problem larger than most other near-term concerns.

Persis urges us to recognise that nature isn’t inherently good or bad, but rather the result of an amoral evolutionary process. For those that can’t survive the brutal indifference of their environment, life is often a series of bad experiences, followed by an even worse death.

But should we actually intervene? How do we know what animals are sentient? How often do animals really feel hunger, cold, fear, happiness, satisfaction, boredom, and intense agony? Are there long-term technologies that could some day allow us to massively improve wild animal welfare?

For most of these big questions, the answer is: we don’t know. And Persis thinks we’re far from knowing enough to start interfering with ecosystems. But that’s all the more reason to start considering these questions.

There are a few concrete steps we could take today, like improving the way wild caught fish are slaughtered. Fish might lack the charisma of a lion or the intelligence of a pig, but if they have the capacity to suffer — and evidence suggests that they do — we should be thinking of ways to kill them painlessly rather than allowing them to suffocate to death over hours.

In today’s interview we explore wild animal welfare as a new field of research, and discuss:

  • Do we have a moral duty towards wild animals?
  • How should we measure the number of wild animals?
  • What are some key activities that generate a lot of suffering or pleasure for wild animals that people might not fully appreciate?
  • Is there a danger in imagining how we as humans would feel if we were put into their situation?
  • Should we eliminate parasites and predators?
  • How important are insects?
  • Interventions worth rolling out today
  • How strongly should we focus on just avoiding humans going in and making things worse?
  • How does this compare to work on farmed animal suffering?
  • The most compelling arguments for not dedicating resources to wild animal welfare
  • Is there much of a case for the idea that this work could improve the very long-term future of humanity?
  • Would increasing concern for wild animals improve our values?
  • How do you get academics to take an interest in this?
  • How could autonomous drones improve wild animal welfare?

Rob is then joined by two of his colleagues — Niel Bowerman and Michelle Hutchinson — to quickly cover:

  • The importance of figuring out your values
  • Chemistry, psychology, and other different paths towards working on wild animal welfare
  • How to break into new fields

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The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

One thing that I really want to see people who are working on this, or people who might be interested in working on this, doing is getting a better sense of, do we know whether these animals actually have morally relevant experiences, and if they do, at what point.

I mean, a large part of what makes this argument compelling is that we expect juvenile animals to also be as sentient as adults. And it’s really not clear that … For example, at what point do we determine that an animal in development is complex enough to be able to experience something like pain? I mean, with oviparous animals, it’s pretty complex as well, because do we measure it from the moment the egg is laid? Do we measure it from the moment the egg hatches? Do we measure it while animals are still in development? There’s a lot of different phases, and it’s really not clear when, if at all, they develop the capacity to feel pain.

I have some concerns about the idea that we could just leave it to future generations to work on, because I think the expectation that we have that they will do it depends on how likely we think it is that they will think wild animals are morally relevant in the future, and it seems pretty plausible to me that there are many scenarios in which we’ve overlooked things in the past and that if we’re not working on promoting the idea that we should be taking a really inclusive approach, then maybe they will overlook it in the future, even if it does become easier and more tractable to work on.

I think there’s probably a medium ground here where what the field of wild animal welfare looks like is, in 10 years, it’s something like advocates are lobbying key decision makers to make decisions that consider the effects that they would have on wild animals as opposed to it being the sort of field where there’s like a group of people who are working on solutions and then trying to implement them. That would actually be my ideal outcome, especially if we expect things to become more tractable down the line. But that does still require that we start working on the problem now because there are a lot of really important questions we need to answer to be able to make that case convincing.

It seems as though a long termist perspective does implicitly include nonhumans in the worldview. I think that if I maybe put myself in the shoes of someone who works primarily on long termist issues, then maybe there’s a concern there that if you try and more widely emphasize that you’re talking about nonhumans, that it becomes much less certain what you mean. So, are you talking about biological animals that exist now? Are you talking about animals that will exist if we colonize space? Are you talking about animals that will exist on different planets? Are you talking about extraterrestrial biological life? Are you talking about artificial life? I mean, it’s pretty unclear. It’s very poorly defined what nonhuman means when you’re talking about the long term future.

And so I can imagine there’s like a tension there between wanting to have a very explicit and clearly defined concept of what you’re working towards that as a result means you try and avoid talking about things that you’re less certain about versus trying to be more explicitly inclusive in the way we communicate it. And I guess that’s a strategic call for people who spend a lot of their time thinking about the best ways to communicate long termist issues.

We could be using autonomous drones more effectively to gather information. They would be much more cost effective than sending people out into the field and much more useful at gathering more detailed information across a wider scale. I mean, across like a larger region. I also think we could be maybe taking advantage of satellite technology more to get a better sense to build or map out climate models or ecosystem models to try and sort of build historical maps and maybe forecast future trends.

I think this stuff does happen, particularly in population ecology work. We do see a lot of this already. But it could be used to a greater extent. And one reason that maybe it hasn’t so far is that it’s very expensive. And no one has really come with the funding to enable existing researchers to do that unless there’s like a very strong incentive, so unless there’s a reason that the government is really interested in this, or there’s an industry or a corporation that’s really interested in this research. It’s pretty hard to just, for researchers to access that kind of technology.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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