disclaimer: I don’t feel like I know much about wild animal welfare, last read about it about 2 years ago
You’re right, I think suffering-focused wasn’t the right term to use, as all WAW interventions that come to my mind are about reducing animals’ suffering. I should’ve asked if you’re assuming that WAW people think that:
animals’ lives are usually net-negative
the best way to help them and future animals is to kill them / cause them to not exist
I would guess that (1) is a common belief, but that a only a minority of people who work in WAW believe in (2). But this guess isn’t based on much.
The first WAW interventions that come to my mind :
Vaccinating animal populations from painful diseases (and finding out a way to do so that doesn’t mess with ecosystems)
seems to be the first intervention idea that WAW advocates like to bring up
Genetically engineering predators to be omnivores for the benefit of their preys
I read people arguing about this in the comments of a slatestarcodex post, don’t know if anyone’s actually pursuing research into the feasibility of it. Either way it seems like this would be super complicated for many reasons, so likely a far off thing.
Incentivizing people to build buildings from certain materials that don’t cause tons of bugs to exist underneath them (assumes that bugs’ expected life experiences are net negative)
probably from Brian Tomasik’s blog
Assuming success, only the last one seems to me like it would be bad from a biodiversity perspective.
disclaimer: I don’t feel like I know much about wild animal welfare, last read about it about 2 years ago
You’re right, I think suffering-focused wasn’t the right term to use, as all WAW interventions that come to my mind are about reducing animals’ suffering. I should’ve asked if you’re assuming that WAW people think that:
animals’ lives are usually net-negative
the best way to help them and future animals is to kill them / cause them to not exist
I would guess that (1) is a common belief, but that a only a minority of people who work in WAW believe in (2). But this guess isn’t based on much.
The first WAW interventions that come to my mind :
Vaccinating animal populations from painful diseases (and finding out a way to do so that doesn’t mess with ecosystems)
seems to be the first intervention idea that WAW advocates like to bring up
Genetically engineering predators to be omnivores for the benefit of their preys
I read people arguing about this in the comments of a slatestarcodex post, don’t know if anyone’s actually pursuing research into the feasibility of it. Either way it seems like this would be super complicated for many reasons, so likely a far off thing.
Incentivizing people to build buildings from certain materials that don’t cause tons of bugs to exist underneath them (assumes that bugs’ expected life experiences are net negative)
probably from Brian Tomasik’s blog
Assuming success, only the last one seems to me like it would be bad from a biodiversity perspective.