EA - Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare by saulius

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare, published by saulius on February 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is the story of how I came to see Wild Animal Welfare (WAW) as a less promising cause than I did initially. I summarise three articles I wrote on WAW: ‘Why it’s difficult to find cost-effective WAW interventions we could do now’, ‘Lobbying governments to improve WAW’, and ‘WAW in the far future’. I then draw some more general conclusions. The articles assume some familiarity with WAW ideas. See here or here for an intro to WAW ideas.My initial opinionMy first exposure to EA was reading Brian Tomasik’s articles about WAW. I couldn’t believe that despite constantly watching nature documentaries, I had never realized that all this natural suffering is a problem we could try solving. When I became familiar with other EA ideas, I still saw WAW as by far the most promising non-longtermist cause. I thought that EA individuals and organizations continued to focus most of the funding and work on farmed animals because of the status quo bias, risk-aversion, failure to appreciate the scale of WAW issues, misconceptions about WAW, and because they didn’t care about small animals despite evidence that they could be sentient.There seem to be no cost-effective interventions to pursue nowIn 2021, I was given the task of finding a cost-effective WAW intervention that could be pursued in the next few years. I was surprised by how difficult it was to come up with promising WAW interventions. Also, most ideas were very difficult to evaluate and their impacts were highly uncertain. To my surprise, most WAW researchers that I talked to agreed that we’re unlikely to find WAW interventions that could be as cost-effective as farmed animal welfare interventions within the next few years. It’s just much easier to change conditions and observe consequences for farmed animals because their genetics and environment are controlled by humans. I ended up spending most of my time evaluating interventions to reduce aquatic noise. While I think this is promising compared to other WAW interventions I considered, there are quite many farmed animal interventions that I would prioritize over reducing aquatic noise.I still think there is about a 15% chance that someone will find a direct WAW intervention in the next ten years that is more promising than the marginal farmed animal welfare intervention.I discuss direct short-term WAW interventions in more detail here.Influencing governmentsEven though WAW work doesn’t seem as promising as farmed animal welfare in terms of immediate impact, some people have suggested that we should do some non-controversial WAW interventions anyway, in order to promote the wild animal welfare field and show that WAW is tractable. But then I questioned: is it tractable? And what is the plan after we do these interventions? I started asking people who work on WAW about the theory of change for the movement. Some people said that the ultimate aim is to influence governments decades into the future to improve WAW on a large scale. But influence them to do what exactly? Any goals I could come up with didn’t seem as promising and unambiguously positive as I expected. The argument for the importance of WAW rests on the enormous numbers of small wild animals. But it’s difficult to imagine politicians and voters wanting to spend taxpayer money on improving wild insect welfare, especially in a scope-sensitive way.It also seems very difficult to find out and agree on what interventions are good for overall wild animal welfare when all things are considered.See here for further discussion of the goals of lobbying governments to improve WAW, and obstacles to doing this.Long-term futureOthers have argued that what matters most in WAW is moral circle exp...