This is fascinating. It strikes me that you can’t avoid the population ethics question here. It’s not obvious to me that the lives of stray dogs is net negative, so focusing just on the WALYs lost from pup mortality ignores the WALYs gained from pups being born and living at all. If stray dogs have net positive lives, then the WALY costs from pup mortality actually become negative (compared to if you sterilized the dogs) and the conclusion changes dramatically.
FRD dogs often lead lives filled with neglect, abuse and suffering, with the only solace being that they often die young.
I don’t want to generalize from my experience, but since you appealed to the experience of anyone who has lived in India, I will say that this is not my experience! Stray dogs in my neighborhood basically coexisted with humans who mostly ignored them, and they never bit anyone in my knowledge.
Analytically, the relationship between stray dogs and humans seems super path dependent. If there was one incident in the past of a dog biting a person, that could spiral into humans antagonizing the dogs and dogs antagonizing the humans, but if there hasn’t been such an experience, stray dogs are basically a benign feature of the environment that you can occasionally pet, and they won’t bite because they get fed. It also surely depends on whether the dogs are being fed meat regularly (which anecdotally makes them more aggressive). I would love to see some more systematic evidence on stray dog living conditions, or anything you know of that suggests a wide-ranging experience of suffering.
Also, I care a lot about animal welfare and I love dogs, but a 1⁄30 conversion rate between WALYs and DALYs seems insanely high to me. I would save one human over 30 dogs and I suspect almost everyone would as well. Given that most of the DALYs come from WALYs in your estimate, a more conservative conversion rate like 1⁄100 would bring down the importance of this cause area a lot from 8 million DALYs to 3.3 million DALYs.
I really appreciate your comment Karthik as I was wrestling with the same feelings myself—the majority of streeties I’ve met at home and during travels have seemed to live happy, agentic lives. I’d go so far as to say some of them lived better lives than many companion dogs — they had complete freedom (to many housed dogs live the majority of their lives tied in the same place), had rich social lives and were allowed to live out their natural impulses. I’m hesitant to know how much to trust this experience, the happy/friendly dogs are far more likely to be the ones I’ve interacted with, and it seems undeniable that the high early mortality, short lifespans, and general insecurity of basic needs suggests a less than desirable state of being. But, I take back how strongly I worded the sentence you quote.
I also realized while writing the tension between highlighting WALYs lost by premature pup deaths and suggesting birth control as an intervention. It seems to boil down to—does the average streetie live a happy life? It’s a seemingly impossible question and I don’t know yet what my answer is. For what it’s worth, on an IG poll I just ran 16 ppl voted No and 4 voted Yes.
About the DALY-WALY conversion, honestly I don’t find comparing cortical neurons to assess degrees of suffering meaningful but I’ll admit to not knowing a better way. I think this is where EA’s forcing apples to be oranges so we can crunch them together breaks down. However, note that DALY-WALY is not the same as dog life—human life, because humans live 8x longer lives. So the 30:1 ratio is implying you should save a human baby over saving 240 puppies. Curious to know if you think that’s too high based off your 1/100th, which would imply the 30:1 ratio is actually too conservative.
The lives vs life years thing shouldn’t change our answer much. I would also not extend the lives of 30 dogs by 1 year compared to extending a human life by 1 year, and honestly the 1⁄100 conversion rate I mentioned is too high for me as well, I just used it as an example of how the comparison changes with a different conversion rate.
This seems to fall under the general confusion and difficulty of evaluating wild animal suffering, and I don’t envy anyone who has to do that.
This is fascinating. It strikes me that you can’t avoid the population ethics question here. It’s not obvious to me that the lives of stray dogs is net negative, so focusing just on the WALYs lost from pup mortality ignores the WALYs gained from pups being born and living at all. If stray dogs have net positive lives, then the WALY costs from pup mortality actually become negative (compared to if you sterilized the dogs) and the conclusion changes dramatically.
I don’t want to generalize from my experience, but since you appealed to the experience of anyone who has lived in India, I will say that this is not my experience! Stray dogs in my neighborhood basically coexisted with humans who mostly ignored them, and they never bit anyone in my knowledge.
Analytically, the relationship between stray dogs and humans seems super path dependent. If there was one incident in the past of a dog biting a person, that could spiral into humans antagonizing the dogs and dogs antagonizing the humans, but if there hasn’t been such an experience, stray dogs are basically a benign feature of the environment that you can occasionally pet, and they won’t bite because they get fed. It also surely depends on whether the dogs are being fed meat regularly (which anecdotally makes them more aggressive). I would love to see some more systematic evidence on stray dog living conditions, or anything you know of that suggests a wide-ranging experience of suffering.
Also, I care a lot about animal welfare and I love dogs, but a 1⁄30 conversion rate between WALYs and DALYs seems insanely high to me. I would save one human over 30 dogs and I suspect almost everyone would as well. Given that most of the DALYs come from WALYs in your estimate, a more conservative conversion rate like 1⁄100 would bring down the importance of this cause area a lot from 8 million DALYs to 3.3 million DALYs.
I really appreciate your comment Karthik as I was wrestling with the same feelings myself—the majority of streeties I’ve met at home and during travels have seemed to live happy, agentic lives. I’d go so far as to say some of them lived better lives than many companion dogs — they had complete freedom (to many housed dogs live the majority of their lives tied in the same place), had rich social lives and were allowed to live out their natural impulses. I’m hesitant to know how much to trust this experience, the happy/friendly dogs are far more likely to be the ones I’ve interacted with, and it seems undeniable that the high early mortality, short lifespans, and general insecurity of basic needs suggests a less than desirable state of being. But, I take back how strongly I worded the sentence you quote.
I also realized while writing the tension between highlighting WALYs lost by premature pup deaths and suggesting birth control as an intervention. It seems to boil down to—does the average streetie live a happy life? It’s a seemingly impossible question and I don’t know yet what my answer is. For what it’s worth, on an IG poll I just ran 16 ppl voted No and 4 voted Yes.
About the DALY-WALY conversion, honestly I don’t find comparing cortical neurons to assess degrees of suffering meaningful but I’ll admit to not knowing a better way. I think this is where EA’s forcing apples to be oranges so we can crunch them together breaks down. However, note that DALY-WALY is not the same as dog life—human life, because humans live 8x longer lives. So the 30:1 ratio is implying you should save a human baby over saving 240 puppies. Curious to know if you think that’s too high based off your 1/100th, which would imply the 30:1 ratio is actually too conservative.
The lives vs life years thing shouldn’t change our answer much. I would also not extend the lives of 30 dogs by 1 year compared to extending a human life by 1 year, and honestly the 1⁄100 conversion rate I mentioned is too high for me as well, I just used it as an example of how the comparison changes with a different conversion rate.
This seems to fall under the general confusion and difficulty of evaluating wild animal suffering, and I don’t envy anyone who has to do that.