Comments
[Views my own, not my (former) employer's. I no longer work in the wild-animal-welfare sector and do not speak for them.]
Firstly, most of the wild-animal-welfare EAs I've worked with closely are not negative utilitarians. Most of them care deeply about wild animals living good lives, so I expect them to be quite motivated to find ways to improve WAW without removing WA populations, especially given how controversial that would be, and how huge the side-effects are.
That said...
I have this nagging feeling that they're going to do rigorous research for a few decades, then conclude that the majority of animals on Earth would be better off dead. At this point they'll presumably recommend that we start purging the world of animal life, and to me that sounds like a bad thing, regardless of how convincing the research is.
"Regardless of how convincing the research is" sets off big alarm bells for me. What if it's actually true that the majority of animals on Earth would be better off not existing? This seems pretty likely to be the case for factory farms, for example, so I'm not sure why you're so sure it's wrong for wild animals, many of whom live lives at least that bad.
I'm also not sure what the alternative to researching WAW would be. Just ignore the (plausibly very large) problem? How is that different from ignoring, say, the suffering of animals in factory farms, or of people in chronic pain?
I co-founded 2 of and have worked at another of the 6 organizations that have worked on wild animal welfare with an EA lens. I've been writing or thinking about these things since around 2014. Here are a handful of thoughts related to this:
Overall, I think this concern is pretty unwarranted, though understandable given the online discussion. Everyone I know who works on wild animal welfare cares about animals a lot, and the space has been burdened by these concerns despite them not really referring to views held by folks who lead the space.
Also, one note:
I think it's pretty important to differentiate between people thinking animals would be better off dead (a view held by no one I know), and thinking that some animals who will live will have better lives if we reduce juvenile mortality via reduced fertility, and through the latter, that we would prevent a lot of very bad, extremely short lives. We already try to non-lethally reduce populations of many wild animals via fertility control (e.g. mosquitos, screwworms, horses, cats). These projects are mainstream (outside of EA), widely accepted as good, and for some of them, done for the explicit benefit of the animals who are impacted.
This is very interesting to me.
Is there an accessible summary anywhere of the research underlying this shift in viewpoint?
Would you say this is a general shift in opinion in the WAW field as a whole?
I don't think there has been a summary, but that sounds like a good thing to write. But to quickly summarize things that are probably most informing this:
When I started working in wild animal welfare, basically no one with a bio/ecology background worked in the space. Now many do. Probably many of those people accurately believe that most things we wrote / argued historically were dramatic oversimplifications (because they definitely were). I'm not sure if opinion is shifting, but there is a lot more actual expertise now, and I'd guess that many of those new experts have more accurate views of animals' lives, which I believe ought to incline one to be a least a bit skeptical of some claims made early in the space.
Fertility control is the kind of intervention very few people would have a problem with as long as all the consequences were thought through, I guess it's everything else in the space of possible solutions that makes me nervous.
Isn't it only one thing in the space of possible solutions that makes you nervous: wiping out animals?
I think the entire space of dramatically intervening in natural ecosystems in order to align them with our own moral preferences should make anyone nervous (including fertility control , that could go horribly wrong), especially when the space includes "wiping out animals".
I'm not sure I'd call it one thing exactly, that covers everything from total extinction of all life to specific extinction of some species to merely human management of existing populations. The last option is something we already do to some extent, deer aren't going to hunt themselves and we already wiped out most of the wolves.
The fact that I consider some plausible solutions repellent is not a reason not to look into the space, I'm just trying to explain why I'm averse to it.
One thing that is easy to forget is that we are already dramatically intervening in natural ecosystems without paying attention to the impact on animals. E.g. any city, road, mine, etc. is a pretty massive intervention. Or just using any conventionally grown foods probably impacts tons of insects via pesticides. Or contributing to climate change. At a minimum, ensuring those things are done in a way that is kinder way for animals seems like a goal that anyone could be on board with (assuming it is an effective use of charitable money, etc.).
I do also think that most things like you describe are already broadly done without animal welfare in mind. For example, we could probably come up with less harmful deer population management strategies than hunting, and we've already attempted to wipe out species (e.g. screwworms, probably mosquitos at some point in the future).
This comment should clearly have more karma than mine.
I don't recall there being this many EA-aligned orgs working on wild animal welfare! :O Which ones were they?
I know Utility Farm and Wild Animal Suffering Research merged into Wild Animal Initiative. There's Animal Ethics and Rethink Priorities. Were the other orgs sub-projects of these?
You have 5/6 there already, so we're only missing one.
I think Abraham suggested there were at least 8: he co-founded 2 and worked at another 6.
He said he worked at "another of the 6". (Emphasis mine)
i.e. He co-founded 2 (UF and WAI) and worked at another 1, out of 6 total.
(I don't know what the 6th is)
Woops, ya, you're right.
Animal Charity Evaluators is the 6th, which did some surveying and research work in the space. I guess that counts. My phrasing was ambiguous. There have been 6, I co-founded 2 (UF and WAI), worked at another (Rethink Priorities).
In the time since Abraham wrote this comment, Animal Charity Evaluators recommended one of the orgs he started as a Top Charity! So ACE definitely counts now, and Abe needs to update his resume.
I also think Abe was right to count ACE as working in wild animal welfare before, because their early explorations directly contributed to the formation of the field. For example, the intern that carried out their 2016 survey on attitudes toward wild animal welfare is now a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. (You can see some of Luke Hecht's recent work here.)