My understanding is that screwworm eradication in North America has been treated by wild animal welfare researchers as a sort of paradigmatic example of what wild animal welfare interventions could look like, so I think it is on folks’ radar. And, as Kevin mentions, it looks like Uruguay is working on this now with hopes of turning it into a regional campaign across South America.
I’m guessing one of the main reasons there hasn’t been more uptake in promoting this idea is general uncertainty — both about the knock-on effects of something so large scale, and about whether saving the lives of animals who would have died from screwworm really results in higher net welfare for those animals (in many cases it’s probably trading off an excruciating death now for a painful death later with added months or years of life in-between that may themselves be net-negative). So I do think it’s a big overstatement for the guest to suggest that eradicating screwworm would be two orders of magnitude better than preventing the next 100 years of factory farming, which basically assumes that the wild animal lives saved directly trade-off (positively) against the (negative) lives of farmed animals.
@saulius might know more about this. One quote from a recent post of his: “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.”
Yes! The biggest issue with eradication in the US and Central America is that it has to be maintained with pretty massive international effort. It uses a non-genetic sterile male technique, which means rearing huge amount of males (which require meat and certain conditions to grow), sterilizing them with x-rays, and releasing them by helicopter over the line Panama/Colombia border where the eradication is maintained. The US needs the cooperation of the rest of the North American countries in providing facilities and granting access to distribute the worms to keep it up, and it needed Mexico’s partnership to do the initial eradication, part of which was a public health campaign to get ranchers to treat affected cattle to reduce the spread (as you can see in these amazing comic books the joint commission put out). So far it has proved too difficult to keep going through the jungles of South America to finish the job.
But using gene drives could make it could be easier. There are just all the standard concerns about using gene drives, like it affecting related species. I don’t know enough about the relatives of the screw worm to know if it’s a good candidate there or not.
Interesting point, that what’s at stake here is the delta between an excruciating death now vs a few years of wild animal life and painful death later.
At least some chance of a less terrible death later, no? I’m really not sure what the distribution of causes of death looks like for different types of wild animal hosts
My understanding is that screwworm eradication in North America has been treated by wild animal welfare researchers as a sort of paradigmatic example of what wild animal welfare interventions could look like, so I think it is on folks’ radar. And, as Kevin mentions, it looks like Uruguay is working on this now with hopes of turning it into a regional campaign across South America.
I’m guessing one of the main reasons there hasn’t been more uptake in promoting this idea is general uncertainty — both about the knock-on effects of something so large scale, and about whether saving the lives of animals who would have died from screwworm really results in higher net welfare for those animals (in many cases it’s probably trading off an excruciating death now for a painful death later with added months or years of life in-between that may themselves be net-negative). So I do think it’s a big overstatement for the guest to suggest that eradicating screwworm would be two orders of magnitude better than preventing the next 100 years of factory farming, which basically assumes that the wild animal lives saved directly trade-off (positively) against the (negative) lives of farmed animals.
@saulius might know more about this. One quote from a recent post of his: “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.”
I remember talking about screwworms with @kcudding and @Holly_Elmore, I don’t know how deeply they looked into it but maybe they could comment.
Yes! The biggest issue with eradication in the US and Central America is that it has to be maintained with pretty massive international effort. It uses a non-genetic sterile male technique, which means rearing huge amount of males (which require meat and certain conditions to grow), sterilizing them with x-rays, and releasing them by helicopter over the line Panama/Colombia border where the eradication is maintained. The US needs the cooperation of the rest of the North American countries in providing facilities and granting access to distribute the worms to keep it up, and it needed Mexico’s partnership to do the initial eradication, part of which was a public health campaign to get ranchers to treat affected cattle to reduce the spread (as you can see in these amazing comic books the joint commission put out). So far it has proved too difficult to keep going through the jungles of South America to finish the job.
But using gene drives could make it could be easier. There are just all the standard concerns about using gene drives, like it affecting related species. I don’t know enough about the relatives of the screw worm to know if it’s a good candidate there or not.
Interesting point, that what’s at stake here is the delta between an excruciating death now vs a few years of wild animal life and painful death later.
At least some chance of a less terrible death later, no? I’m really not sure what the distribution of causes of death looks like for different types of wild animal hosts