The juvenile animal argument is interesting, as from a total “QALY” perspective, if animals die very young then unless their deaths are extremely suffering-ful and drawn out, the total time for suffering isn’t that large IMO.
Yep I completely agree that the belief is (or should be) mostly irrelevent to wild animal welfare advocates, and I think WAW might be more palatable to more people if it was emphasised less. “We have cheap and effective ways of helping wild animals live way better lives” is a better markteing tool than “Wild animals have bad live and are suffering soooo much so we have to do something” (aware I’m strawmanning for emphais a bit here). It only becomes relevant for arguments that look at whether the whole world is “net positive or negative”, which I find a bit unhelpful as that discussion doesn’t get us closer to making things better.
On that I appreciated these points
”On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
The juvenile animal argument is interesting, as from a total “QALY” perspective, if animals die very young then unless their deaths are extremely suffering-ful and drawn out, the total time for suffering isn’t that large IMO.
Yep I completely agree that the belief is (or should be) mostly irrelevent to wild animal welfare advocates, and I think WAW might be more palatable to more people if it was emphasised less. “We have cheap and effective ways of helping wild animals live way better lives” is a better markteing tool than “Wild animals have bad live and are suffering soooo much so we have to do something” (aware I’m strawmanning for emphais a bit here). It only becomes relevant for arguments that look at whether the whole world is “net positive or negative”, which I find a bit unhelpful as that discussion doesn’t get us closer to making things better.
On that I appreciated these points
”On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
Yeah, I agree with everything you say here RE WAW, on both how to present it and the usefulness of the net-positive or negative debate.