A quite compelling reason for caring more about factory farmed animals is that we are inflicting a massive injustice against them, and that isn’t the case for wild animals generally.
But couldn’t you say that, for instance, the forces of evolution are inflicting an even more massive injustice against wild animals? Assuming injustices are more relevant because our species happens to inflict them doesn’t seem 100% convincing to me. From the animal’s point of view, it probably doesn’t matter very much whether its situation is caused by some kind of injustice, what matters to the animal is whether and by what degree it’s suffering.
I do of course share your intuition about injustice being bad generally, and “fixing your own mistakes before fixing those of others” so to speak seems like a reasonable heuristic. It’s hard to tell whether the hypothetical “ideal EA movement” would shift its focus more towards WAS than it currently does, or not. My rather uninformed impression is that quite many EAs know about the topic and like talking about it—just like we are now—so it often seems there’s a huge focus on wild animals, but the actual work going into the area is still a great degree lower than that. https://was-research.org/about-us/team/ still only lists three employees, after all.
Also I, too, like the visualization. I wonder how it would look with ~2k animals/second, which seems to be the sad statistic of the planet.
But couldn’t you say that, for instance, the forces of evolution are inflicting an even more massive injustice against wild animals? Assuming injustices are more relevant because our species happens to inflict them doesn’t seem 100% convincing to me. From the animal’s point of view, it probably doesn’t matter very much whether its situation is caused by some kind of injustice, what matters to the animal is whether and by what degree it’s suffering.
I do of course share your intuition about injustice being bad generally, and “fixing your own mistakes before fixing those of others” so to speak seems like a reasonable heuristic. It’s hard to tell whether the hypothetical “ideal EA movement” would shift its focus more towards WAS than it currently does, or not. My rather uninformed impression is that quite many EAs know about the topic and like talking about it—just like we are now—so it often seems there’s a huge focus on wild animals, but the actual work going into the area is still a great degree lower than that. https://was-research.org/about-us/team/ still only lists three employees, after all.
Also I, too, like the visualization. I wonder how it would look with ~2k animals/second, which seems to be the sad statistic of the planet.