Context: I’m a senior fellow at Conservation X Labs (CXL), and I’m seeking support as I attempt to establish a program on humane rodent fertility control in partnership with the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC). CXL is a biodiversity conservation organization working in sustainable technologies, not an animal welfare organization. However, CXL leadership is interested in simultaneously promoting biodiversity conservation and animal welfare, and they are excited about the possibility of advancing applied research that make it possible to ethically limit rodent populations to protect biodiversity. I think this represents the wild animal welfare community’s first realistic opportunity to bring conservation organizations into wild animal welfare work while securing substantial non-EA funding for welfare-improving interventions.
Background
Rodenticides cause immense suffering to (likely) hundreds of millions of rats and mice annually through anticoagulation-induced death over several days, while causing significant non-target harm to other animals. In the conservation context, rodenticides are currently used in large-scale island rat and mouse eradications as a way of protecting endemic species. But these rodenticides kill lots of native species in addition to the mice and rats. So advancements in fertility control would be a benefit to both conservation- and welfare-focused stakeholders.
CXL is a respected conservation organization with a track record of securing follow-on investments for technologies we support (see some numbers below). We are interested in co-organizing a "Big Think" workshop with WAI and BIWFC. The event will launch an open innovation program (e.g., a prize or a challenge process) to accelerate fertility control development. The program would specifically target island conservation applications where conservation groups are already motivated to replace rodenticides, but would likely also have application in urban and agricultural areas.
Why this approach?
Rodent fertility control science needs more financial investment than the animal welfare community can provide. It’s a rare case where interests between animal welfare groups, conservation groups, and corporations may be fairly well-aligned, presenting an opportunity to secure non-animal funding for a highly beneficial animal welfare outcome. Additionally, the science of fertility control is extremely important in the long term for wild animal welfare interventions generally. CXL’s open innovation programs (prizes and grand challenges) have been successful at generating excitement and growth in novel research areas, ranging from low-carbon air conditioning to mercury-free gold extraction to biodegradable textiles. This project offers an opportunity to use these innovation tools to serve animal welfare.
Although options in the rodent fertility control space are promising, the field needs further research to get a viable product. Through collaboration with WAI and BIWFC, we have determined that rodenticide companies may be interested in investing in fertility control (especially due to public dislike for rodenticides, recent rodenticide-implicated deaths of high-profile animals like Flacco the owl, and impending bans in Europe), but these companies need something to push them into action due to hesitations around efficacy. We think a prize could effectively stimulate their engagement and open up their R&D budgets for fertility control development.
Why CXL?
CXL is particularly well-positioned to foster innovation in humane, field-applicable fertility control methods. First, we have strong working relationships with groups like Island Conservation, who actually administer these rodent eradications, making it more likely that the research will lead to changes in implementation. Second, we have extensive experience in open innovation and a great track record of securing corporate partnerships and other funding for innovation on comparatively small budgets. CXL has led 19 prizes and grand challenges and supported 177 innovations. The $12M in prizes given to innovators have resulted in $570M of follow-on support from investors, larger companies, and governments for participants after their work with CXL—a 45x return-on-investment.
Our Global Cooling Prize (in partnership with Rocky Mountain Institute) provides an example: budgets for staff time across partners were in the range of $400k per year (~ $800k total), and from this initial investment we successfully fundraised enough to make grants of $100-200k to 10 semi-finalists, along with a $1M final prize (~ $2.5M total). Major investments were also made in marketing the prize, facilitating in-person meetings, and product testing — these activities are of enormous value for attracting new research talent to the area of focus and stimulating growth of an ongoing research community that builds off of the prize. The semi-finalists often worked with corporate partners to get additional research funding, and several have successfully commercialized their products since.
Perhaps uniquely among conservation technology organizations, CXL recognizes animal welfare as an ethically relevant consideration and is willing to restrict innovations to those that do not cause animal suffering. Finally, while I will organize and facilitate fundraising efforts, CXL’s leadership—all highly accomplished fundraisers—will court donors for our program from the biodiversity, environment, health, and private sectors once the program is in motion.
Why now, and why me?
We have all the pieces in place to make significant strides on this issue, except for funding. I have a strong background in conservation; I worked for five years as WWF India’s national lead for elephant conservation, but I have also been active in wild animal welfare, publishing arguably the highest-profile peer-reviewed article on animal welfare in conservation and incorporating animal welfare into elephant conservation policy. I am well-suited to bridge these two worlds, and over the last year I have gotten CXL leadership on board with the fertility control innovation program. Unfortunately, though, CXL works on a restricted funding model and does not have funds available to cover this program without donors specifically asking for it. Without this funding, my position terminates and the partnership with WAI and BIWFC will almost definitely dissolve.
Budget
Immediate needs: $242,000 for salary, benefits, travel, and overhead at CXL. This funding will allow me to focus on fundraising efforts within the conservation community and on building corporate partnerships that would ultimately fund the open innovation initiative. The total budget we expect for the open innovation process is around $400k annually for the consortium partners (CXL, WAI, BIWFC) to design and run the process and ideally $1M for the innovation prize (which, again, we expect to mostly come from major foundations and corporate partners). It’s possible we could run a narrow version of the program on a slightly smaller budget, but we think a lot of the long-term value comes from things like marketing investments that grow the size of the fundraising and scientific communities.
Next steps
If you’re interested in supporting this initiative in part or in full, please let me know! I can be contacted at [email protected].
I'm the executive director of @Wild_Animal_Initiative (WAI), one of CXL's partners on this project, so I just wanted to weigh in to underscore how important this project is and how well-qualified Nitin is to lead it.
Rodent fertility control
Rodent fertility control is the near-term intervention we are most excited about, by far. In large part that's because it advances progress on several levels at once:
Nitin
I would like to just briefly affirm that -- while one of the many lovely things about the EA Forum is that any ol' schmuck can walk in and contribute to the marketplace of ideas -- Nitin isn't any ol' schmuck.
In the six years WAI has spent looking for natural scientists open to working on wild animal welfare, Nitin stands out as one of the field's most promising champions yet. Since we first met in 2020 (when he and @Derek Shiller published their article in Science), it's been clear that he's deeply committed to anti-speciesist ethics and fascinated by the complexity of the ecological questions that raises.
On paper, Nitin seems like the perfect person to start welfare discussions in conservation spaces. In practice, he's so good at it that he does it almost accidentally. This whole CXL-WAI-BIWFC collaboration grew out of a conversation he had with CXL colleagues at lunch one day. He brought up rodenticides -- how much suffering they cause, how many native species they kill along the way -- and before he knew it, he was talking to leadership about whether this is something they would really want the org to do. (At least, that's my memory of how Nitin explained it to us when he reached out, with so much pleasant surprise he was almost apologetic, to notify us that our dreams of a rodent fertility control project might come to fruition much sooner than we'd expected.) Less accidentally, but more verifiably: He also started discussions at CXL that led to them adopting a plant-based food policy for the organization -- a quicker pivot than even some animal advocacy organizations have been able to pull off.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he's great to work with. He's the kind of person who makes you feel interesting when you talk to him, even though you're the one walking away learning more. He's a strong writer, a clear thinker, a creative ideator, and a prompt emailer. Good ideas live or die by the talent of the people executing them, and Nitin's got the chops to make good on donors' investments in this project.
If you have any questions about Wild Animal Initiative's perspective on this issue or this project, please don't hesitate to reply here or email me at [email protected].
I appreciate Cam putting the potential benefits of this work so effectively and succinctly.
I do want to add one thing here though: the plant-based policy at CXL, as well as the interest in this work, is not just a function of me-- it's a function of CXL. My colleagues are excited by the idea of finding win-wins for biodiversity and animal well-being, presenting what to me is a unique opportunity to help bring animal welfare concerns into mainstream conservation.
Thanks for calling that out, Nitin! I was worried my succinctness wasn't giving them enough credit.
I've met several of your colleagues, and it's clear they're not pawns in your game. They are mission-driven people who are unusually clear-eyed about what they value, unusually ambitious about doing good, and unusually creative about how to do it. That seems to be a big part of why they're taking steps most conservation orgs haven't: they understand that responding to existential threats with appropriate urgency doesn't rule out doing good in other ways (and that a tunnel-vision approach could actually make them less effective at achieving their top priority).
At the same time, I want to make sure we're giving due credit to the huge number of other conservationists who care about animal welfare, yet don't see those values reflected in the policies and priorities of their organizations (as you mention in your Science paper linked above; full text here). And to your CXL colleagues before you joined! It's not that some people care about welfare and others don't; it's that institutional change requires more than good intentions. You also need someone to start conversations, make people feel psychologically safe enough to consider changing their minds, contribute domain expertise, and find where the levers of change are (at both the individual and organizational level). Oh, and the person doing that needs to be good at it -- plenty have tried and failed, and not for lack of passion.