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:
Directly reducing human-caused harm (i.e., slow, painful deaths by anticoagulant rodenticides) in the short term (i.e., starting in 1-7 years) at fairly large scales relative to other wild animal animal welfare interventions (i.e., hundreds of thousands to tens of millions a year, possibly much more once non-target species are accounted for).
Growing the coalition of people, organizations, movements, and sectors involved in wild animal welfare work. In contrast to the edgelord thought experiments that originally popularized the idea of wild animal welfare within EA, rodent fertility control sits at an unusually convenient intersection of wild animal welfare (less rat torture), biodiversity conservation (fewer species literally going the way of the dodo), agriculture/​manufacturing/​food safety (fewer rats on farms, in factories, etc.), and human quality of life (fewer rats where people don’t want them). That’s helpful both for increasing the resources available to wild animal welfare work, and for shifting social norms toward caring more about wild animal welfare.
Opening windows for policy work on wild animal welfare. Developing/​validating an effective humane means of rodent fertility control would open up many angles for wild animal welfare advocates to make concrete, practical, non-controversial asks of policymakers. This would not only help scale up rodent fertility control, but it would help build out the policy arm of our movement, putting us in a better position to implement even larger-scale, lower-cost solutions as wild animal welfare science progresses.
Pioneering a broadly applicable wildlife management strategy. Advancing rodent fertility control could lead to advancements in fertility control for other species as well, which would broaden the eventual impact of this work. Fertility control is not only promising for reducing lethal control. It could also be used to benefit more-wild populations that are currently being limited by intraspecific competition for food or other resources. Or it could be paired with wild animal welfare interventions that reduce mortality (e.g., oral rabies vaccination programs) so that reducing mortality doesn’t lead to population growth that could have negative effects on other populations.
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 cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org.
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.
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:
Directly reducing human-caused harm (i.e., slow, painful deaths by anticoagulant rodenticides) in the short term (i.e., starting in 1-7 years) at fairly large scales relative to other wild animal animal welfare interventions (i.e., hundreds of thousands to tens of millions a year, possibly much more once non-target species are accounted for).
Growing the coalition of people, organizations, movements, and sectors involved in wild animal welfare work. In contrast to the edgelord thought experiments that originally popularized the idea of wild animal welfare within EA, rodent fertility control sits at an unusually convenient intersection of wild animal welfare (less rat torture), biodiversity conservation (fewer species literally going the way of the dodo), agriculture/​manufacturing/​food safety (fewer rats on farms, in factories, etc.), and human quality of life (fewer rats where people don’t want them). That’s helpful both for increasing the resources available to wild animal welfare work, and for shifting social norms toward caring more about wild animal welfare.
Opening windows for policy work on wild animal welfare. Developing/​validating an effective humane means of rodent fertility control would open up many angles for wild animal welfare advocates to make concrete, practical, non-controversial asks of policymakers. This would not only help scale up rodent fertility control, but it would help build out the policy arm of our movement, putting us in a better position to implement even larger-scale, lower-cost solutions as wild animal welfare science progresses.
Pioneering a broadly applicable wildlife management strategy. Advancing rodent fertility control could lead to advancements in fertility control for other species as well, which would broaden the eventual impact of this work. Fertility control is not only promising for reducing lethal control. It could also be used to benefit more-wild populations that are currently being limited by intraspecific competition for food or other resources. Or it could be paired with wild animal welfare interventions that reduce mortality (e.g., oral rabies vaccination programs) so that reducing mortality doesn’t lead to population growth that could have negative effects on other populations.
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 cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org.
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.