Keyvan Mostafavi comments on Ditching what we are good at: A change of course for Anima International in France

[Keyvan Mostafavi]

Yes, eradicating the New World screwworm was part of the initial 94 ideas we listed. This idea didn’t make it to the second round because we have a preference for operating in France, and because navigating the Latin America context as French people seemed difficult.

I find this idea very promising as it could reduce a huge amount of animal suffering. Although I was wondering how sure we are that a death caused by the screwworm is worse than the average death in nature for those animals.

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Although I was wondering how sure we are that a death caused by the screwworm is worse than the average death in nature for those animals.

Thanks for noting this, Keyvan! I also worry about that.

I am fine with neglecting indirect effects on other wild animals besides the infected animals and screwworms, but I think these are the most directly affected (the goal of the intervention is their eradication), so they should be considered. Do you know whether the increase in welfare of the no longer infected wild animals would be larger than the decrease in welfare of the eradicated screwworms assuming these have positive lives? If it takes 100 worm-years, like 100 worms for 1 year, to kill a host animal, and each lethal infection is worse than the counterfactual death by 0.5 host-years of fully healthy life, the welfare per worm-year would only have to be more than 0.5 % (= 0.5/​100) of the welfare per host-year of fully healthy life for the intervention to be harmful^[1]. This seems possible considering that Rethink Priorities’ median welfare range of silkworms is 0.388 % (= 0.002/​0.515) of that of pigs. I also think the worms may have positive lives because they basically live inside the food they eat. I suspect there is a natural tendency to neglect the effect on worms because they are disguting (at least to me^[2]), but this is not a good reason to disregard their welfare.