#210 – Dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals (Cameron Meyer Shorb on The 80,000 Hours Podcast)

[80000_Hours]

We just published an interview: Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if we continue doing research, both at the theoretical level — How do ecosystems work? What sorts of things are likely to have what sorts of indirect effects? — and then also at the practical level — Is this intervention a good idea? — I really think we’re going to come up with plenty of things that would be helpful to plenty of animals. — Cameron Meyer Shorb

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Cameron Meyer Shorb — executive director of the Wild Animal Initiative — about the cutting-edge research on wild animal welfare.

They cover:

• How it’s almost impossible to comprehend the sheer number of wild animals on Earth — and why that makes their potential suffering so important to consider.

• How bad experiences like disease, parasites, and predation truly are for wild animals — and how we would even begin to study that empirically.

• The tricky ethical dilemmas in trying to help wild animals without unintended consequences for ecosystems or other potentially sentient beings.

• Potentially promising interventions to help wild animals — like selective reforestation, vaccines, fire management, and gene drives.

• Why Cameron thinks the best approach to improving wild animal welfare is to first build a dedicated research field — and how Wild Animal Initiative’s activities support this.

• The many career paths in science, policy, and technology that could contribute to improving wild animal welfare.

• And much more.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

One concrete example of how we might improve wild animal welfare

Cameron Meyer Shorb: One thing that I think is a good image to have in your mind as to what a scalable near-term intervention to help wild animals might look like could be selective reforestation. So the United Nations has a programme originally called REDD for incentivising farmers to plant forests in their fields to sequester carbon and help mitigate climate change.

It’s now called REDD+: the plus stands for how now the programme is not just about climate change; it’s also about conservation and sustainable development — so they’re encouraging communities to plant forests that will provide income streams to them.

You could imagine REDD++ could be conservation, sustainable development, climate mitigation, and also wild animal welfare. So when you’re planting a forest in most regions of the world, there are several different kinds of forests you would be able to plant — several different “stable states,” you might call them. So you could maybe plant a forest that is primarily pine trees, or another that’s primarily oak or some other broad-leaved tree.

And we already know that these types of forests support very different types of animals: different species, different abundances of those species, different combinations of them. And we don’t know right now exactly how to do this math, but you can imagine if we were able to make even very rough gestures at the total welfare of different animal populations, then we might be able to stack up the census of animal populations in each of these forestry options, and make a guess at which of these options supports more animals living fulfilled, flourishing lives, and leads to the existence of fewer animals that might suffer terribly.

If you were to find the answer to that, then this is something that you could just incorporate into existing land management policy. You could scale it across huge regions; you could adapt it to different circumstances. And it does require more empirical knowledge and methodologies than we have right now, but it doesn’t require any new technology.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I love that. I hadn’t heard that as a potential intervention at all before, and I feel super excited about it.

I know I’m putting you in a tough position by asking this, but do you have any guesses, even if they’re really early ones, about which ecosystems might have the most flourishing in them, or which ecosystems might have the most suffering in them?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: I don’t know the answer to that. As I think we’ll get into later, there are a couple crucial uncertainties that could push things either way. I think the way to proceed on something like this, without having to answer every question there is to ask about wild animal welfare, would probably be to start by finding two systems that are fairly similar except for one key component. So maybe we find that two types of forests tend to host similar amounts of similar kinds of insect life, and similar amounts of similar kinds of bird life, but one is much more amenable to mammal life. Then at least we could narrow down the scope of the questions we’re asking, and research the particulars and make an informed guess there.

I guess that’s the last thing I’ll say: in a lot of domains, it’s helpful to do these back-of-the-envelope calculations, or broad guesses of what are the generalities. But I think in the context of wild systems and ecology, one thing that comes up again and again is that the particulars matter, and you often just can’t make generalisations that sweep worldwide. A lot of what ecology is is the game of trying to figure out when do things generalise from one system to another? What are the rules here? But the default expectation is that you won’t know everything before you look at the specifics.

How many wild animals are there, and which animals are they?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Most minds are wild, weird, and wet. They’re just not humans or human-like things. To try to get a sense of scale, I’ll suggest a visualisation. Let’s imagine for the sake of this exercise that we’re going to put a dot down of equal size for any individual that’s alive. So one dot for a human, one dot for a squirrel — and you can debate later how you want to make tradeoffs across species — but just for starters, to get a sense of the raw numbers.

Now, let’s make these dots small enough so that we can fit all 8.2 billion humans onto the face of a quarter or a euro — so something a little smaller than one square inch. If we’re keeping that scale, then the 88 billion wild mammals would take up an area about the size of a credit card or a post-it note.

And then when we move on to birds — and I should say these estimates are all very rough, and the bigger the populations, the wider the error bars are — but for birds, let’s say there are about 200 billion living in the wild. That would be something about the size of a standard envelope.

And then for reptiles and amphibians, each of those numbers somewhere around one trillion individuals, two trillion put together. So a trillion would be a standard sheet of paper. I think this is a good place to pause and just think about how far we’ve come: from a quarter to an envelope, which is way bigger than a quarter, to a couple sheets of paper compared to a quarter that contains all of human experience and 8.2 billion lives. There’s that, times many, many more, if you’re trying to encompass humans and mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians.

Then the numbers get even more mind-boggling when we move on to fish. There’s something like 10 trillion fish in the world. So 10 trillion fish would be something like the size of a medium-sized desk — the Linnmon from Ikea, if you will — or a large bath mat, or a couple of pillowcases maybe. That’s what the whole fish population would look like, relative to the human population fitting on a quarter.

And the numbers get really… I don’t know what “to boggle” means literally, but I think it is something like what is happening to my mind. I think it is mind-boggling to try to imagine the number of plausibly sentient invertebrates. So the only at all close-to-useful number I found here is an estimate of the number of terrestrial arthropods — that would be animals with hard exoskeletons, like insects and arachnids and crustaceans. So for those that live on land, estimates are that their population is somewhere around 100,000 trillion. If 8.2 billion humans fit on the face of a quarter, 100,000 trillion would need to be something the size of a city block or a FIFA regulation-size soccer field.

Imagine standing at any point in a soccer field and looking at a quarter and then looking around at the rest of the field. It really changes your perspective on what life on Earth is like, who’s really living here. And it’s hard to know whether many arthropods are sentient. I think there’s decent questions and considerations on either side. But one of the things that I think is important to consider is the expected value. So even if there’s just a 10% chance that they are, 10% of a soccer field is still way bigger than a quarter.

Why might wild animals be suffering?

Luisa Rodriguez: To help us generate some intuitive hypotheses, even if we don’t necessarily take them too seriously, can you say more about the ways in which wild animals might suffer? I think when I first started learning about this topic, I had a very specific picture in mind. When I imagined wild animal suffering, it was something like a pack of lions taking down a baby wildebeest — so, predation. Now I have the impression that there’s actually a wide range of things that wild animals probably experience that might be causing them to suffer or might be causing them joy. Does that sound right? And if so, what categories of experiences should I be thinking of?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I’m not sure that I have an exhaustive list, but I tend to think of it in terms of how they live and how they die. So how they live: How do they meet their basic needs? What kinds of food do they eat? How abundant is that? How easy is that to get? Part of that is the actual experience of grazing or hunting or foraging. And part of it is also about the abundance of food, which is not just a fixed absolute value, but also a feature of the amount of competition with other members of the same species or other species. So how hard is it to get food?

How hard is it to avoid exposure to the weather? I think this is something that people might underestimate about the difficulty of living in the wild, because we think animals are just born with the perfect raincoats or whatever, and they have everything they need all the time. But many animals need to navigate a range of environments, a range of weather events — and they can do it, but it’s a matter of getting under the bark at the right time or getting to the right side of the mountain or something. So how hard is that to do, and what happens when you don’t do it?

Other kinds of experiences during life can be: What are your experiences like when you interact with other species? Interactions with other members of the same species? As humans, we tend to have positive interactions. We’re social animals. Many animals are primarily solitary and interact with other members of their own species primarily to compete or to defend territory.

And then of course there’s mating. There’s a whole range of ways that could be for wild animals, because there’s such a wide range of reproductive systems — some of which I think are pretty pleasurable to undergo, some of which I think are pretty excruciating.

Then there’s interactions with other species. So that could be competition with other species for food. It could of course be predation or preying upon other animals.

And that kind of gets into the other big bucket of types of causes of suffering: things that could cause death or dramatically decrease animals’ health. Disease is a big one. That can come from pathogens or from parasites. Again, looking at weather, there can be extreme weather events like fires or storms or floods.

And then there can be predation: What kinds of predators are there? How stressful is it to avoid those predators? When you are getting eaten, what is that experience? How long does it last? What are the physiological reactions to that experience?

I don’t know that I’ve hit them all, but that I think is a brief survey of the types of things that we think about and like to ask questions about.

The objection that we shouldn’t meddle in nature because nature is good

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s talk about other common objections you hear. One is that “nature is good.” In other words, the natural world and natural and wild places are special and important. And even though the circle of life is violent and brutal and might cause some animals to suffer sometimes, it’s also special, and we should preserve and protect that specialness. Do you have a reaction to that?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think the claim that nature is good often has bundled together in it some empirical assumptions and some normative claims. So the empirical assumptions are things we’ve been talking about, about the actual facts of the matter: How much are animals suffering in these circumstances? Is that outweighed by other experiences in their life?

And then the normative claim, which I think is really what you’re trying to get at here, is: Is there some other thing that we should be valuing, other than just the experience of the individuals? Obviously, this is an area where different ethical systems can diverge.

If you’re more consequentialist, I think this would be less persuasive. Many forms of deontology would be more interested in these kinds of arguments.

But I think for all of those systems, you would at least need a way to explain why we’re treating animals differently than we treat humans. And normally, “nature is good” is not a sufficient reason for letting children die of malaria, or letting people’s homes be burned in wildfire, or any number of totally naturally occurring harms that humans have spent centuries insulating ourselves from.

So I think just in practice, most people, even if they hold this belief in some circumstances, are actually applying a double standard — and a more fair, and more compassionate, more ethical approach would acknowledge that even if there is some value to naturalness itself, it’s probably not worth imposing or allowing for extreme suffering.

Luisa Rodriguez: Just to quickly define those terms, consequentialism is the philosophical orientation that says you should evaluate the morality of actions based on their outcomes, whereas deontology says an action is good or bad based on whether you’ve followed the right moral rules or duties, regardless of the consequences.

But yeah, I can really easily get in touch with this feeling. Like I imagine watching Planet Earth and Blue Planet, and I can picture the polar bears and the parrots, and I’m like, “It is really cool that basically no humans have entered parts of the Amazon, and that those things arose naturally, and they go about their business and they’re so diverse and so magical and so special” — and I feel a real pull toward that.

But I think the thing that you’ve said is just true for me. Like that is a reason; it’s just not a good enough reason to accept the kinds of experiences that we think these animals might be having. So maybe there’s something about accepting it as a real value, but just being like it’s not a value that trumps other ones — like, “make sure that there aren’t trillions of beings having terrible experiences on the regular.”

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. It’s totally fair for those values to be on the table. My suspicion is that lots of times people are just not giving enough weight to these other values, which are the experiences of the wild animals themselves.

And I also think there’s some interesting things to dig into on that point about the value of totally undisturbed nature. I also really treasure that. Some things to pull apart there.

One, there’s a value there, which is me enjoying that. That is a real welfare thing. Put that on the scales. But the animals living there might feel differently. Like, I find it very interesting to go into extremely poor neighbourhoods in other countries and see what that world is like. But I have some sense that these are slums and I shouldn’t just celebrate these unabashedly. There are tradeoffs here. It’s interesting for me, but I would prefer people not live in slums.

And then there’s also the idea of undisturbed nature itself, which is just historically inaccurate for most places on Earth — unless you want to really wind back the clock tens of thousands of years, which you might. But it just is the case that many of the animals and environments that we know today have lived in the presence of humans for a long time.

Vaccines for wild animals

Cameron Meyer Shorb: In talking about the problem of wild animal welfare, I’ve made a few allusions to the progress that we’ve made in human poverty and public health over recent decades and centuries. I think there’s probably a whole class of interventions that’s like, “Look at what’s cost effective in public health, and see if we can translate that to wild contexts.”

Vaccinations look like one area that could be pretty tractable in that respect. There have already been wild animal vaccination programmes that have been developed for the purpose of protecting humans or livestock from diseases spread by animals. So Finland, for example, had a programme vaccinating foxes and raccoon dogs against rabies using bait. So it’s an oral vaccine, something they eat, that I believe is just dropped out of helicopters or aeroplanes en masse. When we think of vaccines, we think of people lining up in an orderly line and getting one shot at a time. But fortunately we wouldn’t have to do that with wild animals: it looks like there’s a way to sort of scatter it across the landscape.

And we would love to do more ecologically informed, intensive followup than I think the Finnish government did, but at least we didn’t see collapse or any terribly disastrous consequences in that case. So I think vaccinations, especially against extremely painful diseases like rabies, that are caused by viruses or pathogens and not by parasites that might be sentient, that seems like a really tractable direction to head in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that just seems straightforwardly good. Are there risks or ways that could backfire, or is that just clearly worth doing?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think it’s still something that has some ways it could backfire. Before we did that at large scales, the first thing I’d want to check is how does that affect the overall populations of the animals being vaccinated? Are their populations rising because there’s lower mortality rates? And if so, is that having effects on other populations?

Or is their death being mostly or entirely compensated by some other cause of death? Are they now getting hit by cars more often? And the nice thing about working with something like rabies is I’m pretty sure that most causes of death are not nearly as bad as rabies, so swapping those out is fine. But I would want to see if we were avoiding trophic cascades.

And then of course there’s the concern about direct effects on non-target species: other animals besides the ones with rabies might be eating those baits and having health effects. So I would want to double check that that wasn’t causing harm at large scales.

But it seems like the kind of thing where the problems are relatively predictable, and it’s a relatively short list of things. And given that it has been tried before, we think that there aren’t going to be a whole bunch of things that jump out, like not a whole tonne of unknown unknowns. So again, the kind of thing that you need to do your homework for, but seems totally possible to do so in the relatively near term.

Gene drive technologies

Luisa Rodriguez: One idea that came up in an interview we did with Kevin Esvelt was using CRISPR gene drive technology to eradicate screwworm, which is, if I’m remembering correctly, a parasitic larva that eats animals, especially cattle, from the inside out. And it sounds like truly horrible, horrible torture. What do you think about this idea?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: I’m quite excited by the idea. So a few more details for those who aren’t squirming yet: it’s a fly that lays its eggs on the open external wounds of mammals — at least mammals, maybe also others — and then the eggs, once they hatch, they immediately burrow into the flesh and eat the necrotic flesh around the wound. They’re called screwworms because they physically have a literal screw-like shape. So they’re born and then they just start wriggling and screwing into the flesh, and it can be extremely painful. It seems really terrible, and terrible enough that it has caused enough physical damage to livestock to be a problem for the livestock industry. It used to be a problem for humans as well when we had less good sanitation.

No one has studied the effects on wild animal welfare that I know of. But I think it’s quite likely that many more wild animals are affected by screwworms than livestock by virtue of this thing we keep bumping into, which is that livestock are really big, it takes a lot of resources to support them, and in any given environment you’re likely to find many more small animals than big animals.

So we’re not sure exactly, but this is actually a project that we have been considering taking on in the near term: looking a little bit into the empirical questions of what other species are affected by this, and then modelling how big was the effect of the eradication of the screwworm from North America. It seems like it could be quite promising. Again, we run into the questions of what are the indirect effects on other species, but a pretty good candidate, I think, for a highly cost-effective, large-scale intervention.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, cool. Do you have a take on CRISPR in particular? Using gene drives to actually make them sterile? Does that seem like the right approach, or are you excited about another one?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think that has a lot of potential. To take a step back, the history of this is that New World screwworm used to be prevalent throughout North America. There was a multinational effort to eradicate it, and it has now been functionally eradicated everywhere north of Panama. And that effort did not use gene drives at all. It didn’t use any sophisticated genetic technologies. It used radiation to radiate a bunch of male flies, then released them in the wild. So these were just like flies who had gotten nuked, they’d just been fried a little bit so that they were sterile.

Anyway, it’s possible to do that without gene drives, and insofar as gene drives are not appealing, or become a problem, or take a while to develop, we don’t have to wait on gene drives to scale up screwworm eradication, to extend that to other regions.

That being said, I think that gene drives are quite exciting. The hesitation in my voice only comes from the fact that I’m worried about getting too excited about them. In theory, CRISPR and the use of gene drives and daisy chains — which are a kind of gene drive that limits the extent of the gene drive, so that you can implement a change in the gene pool and then it’ll kind of wear out after a few generations — all of this could open up so many ways to help wild animals be immune to diseases or who knows what.

Optimising for high-welfare landscapes

Cameron Meyer Shorb: One other category of visions I have, or flavour maybe, is imagining that there could be landscapes that are very different from the ones that exist now. There’s this idea of novel ecosystems becoming of particular interest as climate change shifts around the parameters that certain landscapes are existing under right now. And also there’s the spread of different species, facilitated by humans, invasive species, around the globe.

So we’re already starting to get these novel ecosystems that are happening accidentally. It seems plausible that there could be sets of animals and plants that could just have higher welfare on net than the ones that exist now. Particularly if we were to think that most animals in a forest had net-positive welfare: for example, what if there were forests with trees and plants that just tended to have much more nuts and berries and food was easier to find for everyone? And there are a bunch of ways that there could be unintended effects on insect populations. Who knows, but you could imagine there could be something that feels more like an orchard to the animals living in it than the forest they live in now.

Or on the other side, if it turns out that there are many kinds of animals that don’t have net-positive lives, maybe there are certain kinds of quieter landscapes that would facilitate more happiness or less suffering. So things that look more like the rocky alpine meadows which people often choose as their representative nature when they put a photo of something on their computer desktop, or stretches of desert.

And this tracks what humans have been doing for ourselves, right? As we’ve pursued different ways of designing villages and cities, as we found different forms of farming, we’ve been gradually building landscapes that just meet our needs more. So you could imagine incorporating others’ needs into those calculations as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. Now that you say that, it really does feel like a lot of the objections I hear to specific wild animal welfare ideas apply to humans, and have been at least semi-resolved in the case of humans. Like when I’m worried about increasing population numbers because we’re eliminating diseases in wild animals, I’m like, that’s exactly what we did for humans — and then we also found a way to support more humans, and now we’ve got a massive population that we’re increasingly able to support and take care of. And maybe we can just do that. It feels like we have a very shortsighted…

Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think shortsightedness is exactly what I would call the biggest problem with assumptions underlying objections to researching and trying to improve wild animal welfare. So many of the arguments are some form of, “But I can’t do this today or tomorrow.” And I don’t know, maybe there are moral systems out there where you only care about the things you can do today or tomorrow, and benefits to yourself in future years or your grandchildren or their grandchildren don’t matter. But I think most of us do care about the things that will happen later. I think we’re glad for the things that happened before us that benefit us.

All that being said, I do think there is an important disanalogy to human development, which is that when we’ve made progress for humans, we’ve measured it purely in terms of progress for humans. For example, we’re not even accounting for the harms that has caused for factory farmed animals, right? If you do account for them, then suffering has almost certainly increased among the set of humans plus farmed animals, and by huge orders of magnitudes.

Now, I think you could probably do away with factory farming pretty easily and then balance the equation and it would be a good story. But even so, we have not been accounting for the effects on other species. And the fact is that, like humans, all species currently rely on a whole bunch of other species to exist. So I’m not sure it ever will be possible to have only a few species on Earth who do matter — and as long as there are multiple species who matter, there are almost certainly going to be conflicting interests.