If useful for calibrating, when we launched WAI, I expected it to take 50+ years to feel excited about any large-scale interventions. That level of investment at current wild animal welfare spending levels seems very worth it given the scale of the the issues at stake — at current levels, it would cost less over 50 years than is spent on farmed animal welfare in a single year, and farmed animal welfare is a much smaller problem by many orders of magnitude.
But my timelines for good WAW interventions are now much shorter—on the order of a few years (so I guess making a correct original prediction at more like 10-15 years). That’s partially due to WAI having a lot of success in building a pipeline for research, but also due to me thinking that non-target effects are less important to understand perfectly than I used to and due to me no longer thinking other animal interventions (with a few very notable exceptions) are particularly cost-effective, such that I think the kinds of interventions on the table in the near future for wild animals look much more promising.
Hi Abraham, thanks for your comment. A quick clarifying question: when you say timelines have gone from 50+ years to a few years, what interventions are you referring to?
Cameron mentioned examples such as bird-feeder design changes and rodent fertility control. Are those the interventions you had in mind when saying that the field is much closer to actionable work?
It would be helpful to understand what fits the updated timeline, and how this aligns with Cameron’s explanation.
A non-exhaustive list of things that seem like plausible candidates from a scale perspective, but are at varying points in the quality of research (and many are probably not near the certainty level we would need on the overall sign, but could be fairly easily, at least for target effects), and a rough guess at the scale of the number of animals that could be impacted by target effects:
Adapting more humane insecticides (hundreds of trillions?)
Indoor cats outside the US (where it’s mostly successfully been done) (low billions)
Eradicating rabies (mostly done successfully in Europe, very much not done in the US and other parts of the world) (tens of millions)
Rodent fertility control (hundreds of millions)
Other fertility control treatments for “pest” animals (pigeons, etc) (tens of millions)
Bird safe glass (already required by law in many jurisdictions (e.g. New York City for new construction)) (hundreds of millions)
All of these seem feasible in the nearer future, but still are minor compared to the scale of the bigger problems in the space, which I think academic field building is fundamental to address. If I could choose only one, I’d choose doing further academic field building over implementing any of these (though luckily we don’t have to choose between them).
(also, to be clear, WAI’s views might be very different than my own—just trying to give a flavor of what kind of timelines I was thinking about when setting up WAI).
Thanks for laying those out. I’d agree that if even one were executed at scale it could be a major win for animals. However, WAI doesn’t appear to have a pathway for turning any of those into reality. The reason for this seems to be ‘we’re not certain enough yet’, but there isn’t a defined threshold for what ‘certain enough’ means.
Field-building has value, but it shouldn’t be the default answer indefinitely, especially when the projected timelines for impact seem to shift so dramatically (suggesting that the original thesis was off, albeit in a direction that’s good for animals). There also isn’t a clearly defined threshold for how much field building is sufficient.
At some point, the movement ought to have clarity on when possible interventions graduate from speculative ideas to actionable programs.
If useful for calibrating, when we launched WAI, I expected it to take 50+ years to feel excited about any large-scale interventions. That level of investment at current wild animal welfare spending levels seems very worth it given the scale of the the issues at stake — at current levels, it would cost less over 50 years than is spent on farmed animal welfare in a single year, and farmed animal welfare is a much smaller problem by many orders of magnitude.
But my timelines for good WAW interventions are now much shorter—on the order of a few years (so I guess making a correct original prediction at more like 10-15 years). That’s partially due to WAI having a lot of success in building a pipeline for research, but also due to me thinking that non-target effects are less important to understand perfectly than I used to and due to me no longer thinking other animal interventions (with a few very notable exceptions) are particularly cost-effective, such that I think the kinds of interventions on the table in the near future for wild animals look much more promising.
Hi Abraham, thanks for your comment. A quick clarifying question: when you say timelines have gone from 50+ years to a few years, what interventions are you referring to?
Cameron mentioned examples such as bird-feeder design changes and rodent fertility control. Are those the interventions you had in mind when saying that the field is much closer to actionable work?
It would be helpful to understand what fits the updated timeline, and how this aligns with Cameron’s explanation.
A non-exhaustive list of things that seem like plausible candidates from a scale perspective, but are at varying points in the quality of research (and many are probably not near the certainty level we would need on the overall sign, but could be fairly easily, at least for target effects), and a rough guess at the scale of the number of animals that could be impacted by target effects:
Adapting more humane insecticides (hundreds of trillions?)
Indoor cats outside the US (where it’s mostly successfully been done) (low billions)
Eradicating rabies (mostly done successfully in Europe, very much not done in the US and other parts of the world) (tens of millions)
Rodent fertility control (hundreds of millions)
Other fertility control treatments for “pest” animals (pigeons, etc) (tens of millions)
Bird safe glass (already required by law in many jurisdictions (e.g. New York City for new construction)) (hundreds of millions)
More effective and humane island predator removal (millions)
Screwworm eradication (tens of billions)
All of these seem feasible in the nearer future, but still are minor compared to the scale of the bigger problems in the space, which I think academic field building is fundamental to address. If I could choose only one, I’d choose doing further academic field building over implementing any of these (though luckily we don’t have to choose between them).
(also, to be clear, WAI’s views might be very different than my own—just trying to give a flavor of what kind of timelines I was thinking about when setting up WAI).
Thanks for laying those out. I’d agree that if even one were executed at scale it could be a major win for animals. However, WAI doesn’t appear to have a pathway for turning any of those into reality. The reason for this seems to be ‘we’re not certain enough yet’, but there isn’t a defined threshold for what ‘certain enough’ means.
Field-building has value, but it shouldn’t be the default answer indefinitely, especially when the projected timelines for impact seem to shift so dramatically (suggesting that the original thesis was off, albeit in a direction that’s good for animals). There also isn’t a clearly defined threshold for how much field building is sufficient.
At some point, the movement ought to have clarity on when possible interventions graduate from speculative ideas to actionable programs.
Let’s see where things stand in a few years.