Cool to see someone writing about this. I have a few miscellaneous thoughts. For context: I’m the strategy director at Wild Animal Initiative and I was recently on the review panel for Morris Animal Foundation’s call for proposals on amphibian and reptile health & welfare.
Wild Animal Initiative has some unpublished, but hopefully forthcoming work from a former staff member on chytrid as a welfare issue.
Chytrid is basically all anyone is talking about in the amphibian space these days. That has made us (WAI) less interested in funding grants on it, because compared to other wild animal welfare issues, it’s less neglected. I can’t disclose non-public details but if you look at Morris’ database of funded studies you can get a sense of how many amphibian proposals connect to chytrid: https://​​www.morrisanimalfoundation.org/​​studies?animal_type=466&study_category=All
That said, I still think this issue is wildly neglected given it’s scale. The fact that WAI doesnt’ really have enough resources to work on this is an illustration of how funding constrained the WAW ecosystem is, not that it doesn’t matter.
I suspect that the cost-effective approach to working on this problem is lobbying to get governments to pay for large-scale treatment & mitigation, rather than trying to intervene at the level of providing care, but I haven’t done any cost-effectiveness analyses on this or anything.
For the sake of pointing out why someone might not prioritize this, though, I should note that folks concerned about net-negative lives might think that amphibians are particularly likely to be in that position because of the high numbers of juveniles that don’t survive to adulthood, and those who worry about suffering of insects might worry that high frog populations contribute to high degrees of insect suffering. So the scale of suffering is much higher than the farming issue raised in the other frog post, but perhaps the externalities are more complicated, if your ethics considers those to be an issue.
Thanks for replying! It’s encouraging to hear about these projects in the pipeline, even if attention isn’t as high as it should be generally. You’ve certainly given me plenty of reading by linking the MAF studies. I’d also be very interested in seeing your former staff’s work when public!
As for lobbying states for funding, it is something that crossed my mind but I didn’t comment on it due to my unfamiliarity with the space. My security-adjacent background and cynicism makes me think you’d be more likely to have success if you sought funding on the basis of zoonotic risk. Maybe my time would be well spent looking for a precedent on this topic. An animal welfare issue that attracts the attention of states with the same scope. Would you happen to have any ideas regarding that? That being said, failing interventions at scale, I still think that smaller welfare projects are worthwhile considering the relatively low cost.
Also, I agree that the k-strategist vs r-strategist divide is perhaps the defining issue of this field. I only hope that we survive long enough as a species with the sufficient technological and moral development to address it. But despite that, I’m inclined to say death by gradual fungal infection is a worse fate than a life lived in the wild. Accepting the former as kinder seems as if it would risk slipping into some anti-natalist thinking which I staunchly oppose. I have similar thinking when comparing insect predation to death by chytridiomycosis. If somebody has research I can read to the contrary I would love to read it. I’m still pretty new to this issue and the field at large.
Cool to see someone writing about this. I have a few miscellaneous thoughts. For context: I’m the strategy director at Wild Animal Initiative and I was recently on the review panel for Morris Animal Foundation’s call for proposals on amphibian and reptile health & welfare.
Wild Animal Initiative has some unpublished, but hopefully forthcoming work from a former staff member on chytrid as a welfare issue.
Chytrid is basically all anyone is talking about in the amphibian space these days. That has made us (WAI) less interested in funding grants on it, because compared to other wild animal welfare issues, it’s less neglected. I can’t disclose non-public details but if you look at Morris’ database of funded studies you can get a sense of how many amphibian proposals connect to chytrid: https://​​www.morrisanimalfoundation.org/​​studies?animal_type=466&study_category=All
That said, I still think this issue is wildly neglected given it’s scale. The fact that WAI doesnt’ really have enough resources to work on this is an illustration of how funding constrained the WAW ecosystem is, not that it doesn’t matter.
I suspect that the cost-effective approach to working on this problem is lobbying to get governments to pay for large-scale treatment & mitigation, rather than trying to intervene at the level of providing care, but I haven’t done any cost-effectiveness analyses on this or anything.
For the sake of pointing out why someone might not prioritize this, though, I should note that folks concerned about net-negative lives might think that amphibians are particularly likely to be in that position because of the high numbers of juveniles that don’t survive to adulthood, and those who worry about suffering of insects might worry that high frog populations contribute to high degrees of insect suffering. So the scale of suffering is much higher than the farming issue raised in the other frog post, but perhaps the externalities are more complicated, if your ethics considers those to be an issue.
Thanks for replying! It’s encouraging to hear about these projects in the pipeline, even if attention isn’t as high as it should be generally. You’ve certainly given me plenty of reading by linking the MAF studies. I’d also be very interested in seeing your former staff’s work when public!
As for lobbying states for funding, it is something that crossed my mind but I didn’t comment on it due to my unfamiliarity with the space. My security-adjacent background and cynicism makes me think you’d be more likely to have success if you sought funding on the basis of zoonotic risk. Maybe my time would be well spent looking for a precedent on this topic. An animal welfare issue that attracts the attention of states with the same scope. Would you happen to have any ideas regarding that? That being said, failing interventions at scale, I still think that smaller welfare projects are worthwhile considering the relatively low cost.
Also, I agree that the k-strategist vs r-strategist divide is perhaps the defining issue of this field. I only hope that we survive long enough as a species with the sufficient technological and moral development to address it. But despite that, I’m inclined to say death by gradual fungal infection is a worse fate than a life lived in the wild. Accepting the former as kinder seems as if it would risk slipping into some anti-natalist thinking which I staunchly oppose. I have similar thinking when comparing insect predation to death by chytridiomycosis. If somebody has research I can read to the contrary I would love to read it. I’m still pretty new to this issue and the field at large.