How to systematically reduce wild animal suffering in the near future

Crosspost from https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2025/03/11/how-to-systematically-reduce-wild-animal-suffering-in-the-near-future/

Reducing wild animal suffering is not easy. We need to do more scientific research on how to safely and effectively reduce wild animal suffering (by supporting organizations like Wild Animal Initiative). However, many people who care about wild animal welfare, are impatient and do not want to wait until we have invented technologies to reduce wild animal suffering. For those people, is there something specific that they can do or that they can support right now? 

Perhaps they can support organizations that directly help wild animals, such as wildlife rescue centers. However, those wildlife rescue centers also help and release predators that are going to harm other wild animals. And suppose one helps starving wild animals by feeding them. If those animals survive, they can reproduce and increase the population of animals, resulting in more competition for food. Eventually some of those newborn animals will die of starvation, or will suffer from diseases or killed in other ways. 

Offering direct help to wild animals provides short-term benefits (for the animals that are helped), but in the longer term (a few years) it faces a waterbed effect: pushing down animal suffering at one place pushes up animal suffering at other places, such that the total amount of animal suffering remains constant. Direct help is like pushing on a waterbed, whereas systematically reducing wild animal suffering is like reducing the amount of water in the waterbed by putting a leak in the bed. But with most currently available and common methods (used at wildlife rescue centers for example), it is not possible to systematically reduce wild animal suffering. 

The waterbed effect of wild animal suffering is basically due to the constant, high reproduction rates of wild animals. As populations cannot grow to infinity, the mortality rate is in the long run always higher than or equal to the reproduction rate. A high reproduction rate (number of newborn offspring per adult couple per year) always results in a high mortality rate (number of animals dying per thousand animals per year), and we can expect that a high mortality rate positively correlates with animal suffering: if animals are dying at higher rates, their lives are expected to be more miserable. 

This insight offers us a clue for systematic solutions to decrease wild animal suffering. First, we can reduce the reproduction rates of wild animals by using wildlife fertility control methods (by supporting organizations like FYXX Foundation). More cost-effective methods of wildlife fertility control, using biotechnology such as gene drives, are at the moment not feasible and too controversial. 

But instead of wildlife fertility control, we can reduce the average reproduction rate of all wild animals, by a method that is accepted by environmentalists, supported by conservationists and favored by animal welfarists because it involves a kind of direct help to animals. The idea is to help and protect large herbivores. Those animals kill fewer animals than predators (omnivores and carnivores), and they typically have lower reproduction rates than small animals. An adult mare gives birth to ten to twenty foals over her life, which is much lower than the reproduction rate of for example a rabbit. As those animals are large, they are fewer in numbers and can more easily be spotted compared to small animals. That means conventional wildlife fertility control methods such as immunocontraception can be more easily and cost-effectively applied to those large herbivores.

By helping large herbivores, we select for ecosystems that contain relatively more animals with lower reproduction rates and hence less animal suffering. The average reproduction rate of all wild animals in an ecosystem is lower when the ecosystem contains more large herbivores. 

There are already a few organizations that focus on providing help to large herbivores. In terms of their cost-effectiveness to reduce wild animal suffering, we should not only consider the direct help that they provide to the large herbivores, but also the indirect benefit of creating ecosystems with lower average animal reproduction rates. The benefits and hence the cost-effectiveness of their direct help to animals may be low and may be much lower than the cost-effectiveness of animal charities that focus on reducing farmed animal suffering (especially the suffering of farmed chickens, fish and shrimp), but the indirect benefits in terms of changing ecosystem functioning and lowering the overall mortality rate by lowering the reproduction rate, can be huge. 

Here are seven examples of animal charities that may be the most effective to systematically reduce wild animal suffering in the short term, as they prioritize helping large herbivores (horses, donkeys, bison, elephants, rhinos, kangaroos, manatees,…) and hence indirectly conserve and protect ecosystems with lower animal suffering rates:

• American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign
• Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue
• Buffalo Field Campaign
• Save the elephants
• Save the rhino
• The Kangaroo Sanctuary
• Save the Manatee Club

Note that from a longtermist perspective, it would be better to invest now in scientific research to find the most cost-effective ways to decrease wild animal suffering that can be applied in the long, far future. Considering far future wild animal suffering, donations to Wild Animal Initiative will be the most impactful. The abovementioned seven charities are the most impactful charities from a neartermist perspective that prioritizes immediate reductions in wild animal suffering over long term reductions.