I was aiming for something more like: “I don’t think it’s crazy to think we could develop highly cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions, because here’s an example of a program that wasn’t even optimized for wild animal welfare but still seemed to be doing likely-good things fairly affordably.”
I understand that. However, advocating for interventions improving the lives of wild animals seems way less promising that for popular interventions which cost-effectively change land use, such as cost-effectively saving human lives (to decrease the number of soil animals if these have negative lives), or increasing forest area (to increase the number of soil animals if these have positive lives):
Funding HIPF is also not optimised for increasing the welfare of wild animals, and I estimate it increases the welfare of soil animals 110 k (= 1/(9.05*10^-6)) times as cost-effectively as vaccinating raccoons increases the welfare of these even if preventing one raccoon from dying of rabies was as good as 10 QALY.
The cost-effectiveness of advocating for an intervention is the cost-effectiveness of funding the intervention times the money moved to the intervention as a fraction of the spending advocating for it. Fundraising for saving human lives, and increasing forest area is much easier than for improving the conditions of soil animals. So advocating for the former will be more cost-effective than for the latter even if the cost-effectiveness of funding them directly was the same.
[P.S. Still planning to reply to your point about soil animals, but ran out of time today.]
Are you still planning to reply to my points about soil animals?
Thanks, Cam.
I understand that. However, advocating for interventions improving the lives of wild animals seems way less promising that for popular interventions which cost-effectively change land use, such as cost-effectively saving human lives (to decrease the number of soil animals if these have negative lives), or increasing forest area (to increase the number of soil animals if these have positive lives):
Funding HIPF is also not optimised for increasing the welfare of wild animals, and I estimate it increases the welfare of soil animals 110 k (= 1/(9.05*10^-6)) times as cost-effectively as vaccinating raccoons increases the welfare of these even if preventing one raccoon from dying of rabies was as good as 10 QALY.
The cost-effectiveness of advocating for an intervention is the cost-effectiveness of funding the intervention times the money moved to the intervention as a fraction of the spending advocating for it. Fundraising for saving human lives, and increasing forest area is much easier than for improving the conditions of soil animals. So advocating for the former will be more cost-effective than for the latter even if the cost-effectiveness of funding them directly was the same.
Are you still planning to reply to my points about soil animals?
Do you have any thoughts, @mal_graham🔸?