Genetic Enhancement to Turn Animal Suffering to Animal Bliss
The case for animal welfare as a priority goes something like this: tens of billions of land animals are killed for human consumption in factory farms. The conditions in the factory farms would be considered torture if a human was subjected to them. There is a reasonable case that the suffering of these animals—even if they have a reduced capacity for suffering—is tremendous. In fact, the amount of suffering inflicted on animals may be greater than the amount of suffering humans experience by orders of magnitude. The case is even more overwhelming if we consider fish. More so if we consider wild animals. One thoughtful writer reaches the conclusion that factory farming is the worst thing ever. Thus, any efforts to improve the conditions of animals or reduce their consumption could be extremely impactful.
Since most people have little moral concern for animals, reducing this suffering is a daunting task. Moreover, most people find drastically changing their diet—such as for weight loss—to be exceptionally difficult. Even highly morally motivated people who agree that they should be vegan and understand that there is a lot of animal suffering still fail. For these reasons, some are very enthusiastic about laboratory-grown meat. If meat grown in a lab was vastly less expensive, it would become widely adopted without the need for a vast change in moral perspective.
Lab-grown meat would be a vast improvement, but it is worth considering what could be lost. If those tens of billions of animals never exist, they never experience happiness. This is not much of a concern for those who believe their net welfare is way below zero—an exceptionally reasonable belief. However, it is possible to conceive of a different world. Imagine that the tens of billions of animals being farmed experience the exact opposite of intense suffering—an unending bliss. Some have forwarded this as a potential EA cause through the use of pharmaceuticals and others are working on editing some specific genes (faroutinitiative).
I have a different proposal: we could use genetic enhancement to create animals who experience extremely high levels of happiness in their current conditions. Adoption could be rapid if the animals yielded the same amount of food. Unlike pharmaceutical proposals, adoption could be quick if there are no additional costs since at least a small portion of consumers would be willing to raise brands that have “super happy chickens.” Right now, there is a market for cage-free eggs but people still select less ethically raised eggs because they are less expensive. If the cost of having “happy chickens” is almost zero, then it might be widely adopted by even the most unethical food companies. Similar to how some companies get products certified as Kosher, it does not impose major costs on them.
Is genetic enhancement for animal bliss possible? I think so. We know that animal behavior is highly varied and that certain animals enjoy conditions that others hate. Chickens probably hate being confined to small spaces, but a mole may prefer being in an extremely dark hole. Whether or not an animal suffers depends on their genetics, but we are quickly developing tools that can be used to modify or select certain genetic variants such as CRISPR-Cas9 and genetic screening. We could also select via phenotype through selective breeding. Just keep selecting the happier and happier animals.
Animal breeders have been selecting for higher yield for thousands of years. The returns have far exceeded what many may have thought possible—way outside the boundaries of normal animal behavior. Steve Hsu explains:
To take another example, wild chickens lay eggs at the rate of roughly one per month. Domesticated chickens have been bred to lay almost one egg per day. (Those are the eggs we have for breakfast!) Of all the wild chickens in evolutionary history, probably not a single one produced eggs at the rate of a modern farm chicken.
The extremely high yields have contributed to animal suffering—rather than alleviating it. But breeding to change the psychology of animals is also possible since its subject to the forces of evolution.
Perhaps other forms of enhancement would be more efficient. We would need to identify the variants associated with suffering and eliminate them. Some are already posing this through gene editing for specific variants (Faroutinitiative). But this might fail if they aren’t causal. And perhaps we could go further—use genetic enhancement on many genes associated with high welfare—not just against suffering. We could get animals that enjoy their conditions.
Rather than going from 80 billion lives of suffering, we could go to 80 billion lives of bliss. Seems like such a proposal could be immensely important and the expected welfare gain COULD be twice that of eliminating suffering through gene-editing or lab-grown meat.
If the community is receptive, I will write a much more detailed post about how this could be done with genetic enhancement.
If it was practical to do this, I think it would be a good idea.
I do not think it is practical or possible to do this on a large scale in our lifetimes. Trying to mess with the genetics of 80 billion animals from 10 million different species seems inherently doomed to failure, and I can think of so many ways it could go catastrophically wrong.
I would be interested in a post arguing otherwise though!
Regarding “10 million species”: most of the impact would be from doing this for the few species that are farmed in very large numbers like chickens and whiteleg shrimp
I am interested in writing a more thorough follow up post. If you would be willing, could you briefly explain some of your concerns. I want to be thorough in my response! Thank you
Sure.
Issue 1:What genes cause pain expression? are they the same for every animal of every species? It seems likely that an intervention which works in one animal won’t work in another.
Issue 2: How do you check that your intervention is working? For example, suppose your original raccoons screech when you poke them, but the genetically engineered racoons don’t. Is that because they are experiencing less pain, or have they merely evolved not to screech? You’ll have to figure this out for every single species you work on.
issue 3: When humans lose the abililty to feel pain, it usually results in them dying young, as they don’t realise subconciously that their body is being damaged. How would you avoid a similar thing happening to wild animals?
issue 4: Following on from the above, it seems that feeling pain is a huge evolutionary advantage (which is why we evolved it in the first place). If you found a way to genetically modify, say, 90% of a wild coyote population to feel far less pain, wouldn’t the remaining unmodified 10% outcompete them until the original design won out again? Or even if you got 100%, wouldn’t they eventually just re-evolve pain on their own?
Issue 5: How would you actually implement wild animal genetic modification on such a large scale, for so many different species?
Issue 6: Ecosystems can be very fragile and interventions often have severe unknown consequences. It seems likely that genetically modifying large amount of wild animals could have severe effects that could indirectly kill many humans and animals.
Issue 8: Even if you had a way to do all of the above, what would the cost be? It seems likely to be extremely high.
Issue 9: How on earth do you think you will convince governments to let you do this, given the extreme backlash to far less controversial genetic modifications?
A lot of these arguments apply for wild animals but not so much for farmed.
Even if most humans die young if they lose the ability to feel pain, that is not true for Jo Cameron. And the idea of some people thinking about this is to just modify the mutated gene she has in others. I asked GPT-4 and it says that other animals have that gene too.
But it’s not such a big issue if farmed animals injure themselves or die young because they injure themselves. I imagine that injuries are mostly bad because of pain. Higher pre-slaughter mortality would make it less profitable but farmers might find ways to prevent them from dying young or meat prices could be higher.
Thank you! Great thoughts.
See also Breeding happier animals: no futuristic tech required (Carl Shulman, 2012)
Thank you!
If it is indeed possible to modify animal minds to such an extent that we would be 100% certain that previously displeasing experiences are now blissful, then couldn’t we extend this logic and “solve” every single problem? Like, making starvation and poverty and disease and extinction blissful as well?
I feel there are crucial moral and practical (e.g., 2nd order effects) considerations to account for here.
Good question.
I think that a human being in a constant blissful state might endanger someone’s existence or make them non-functional, which isn’t much of an issue for a farm animal.
However, I do think that we can use genetic engineering to make people happier, healthier, and more intelligent than anyone who has ever lived. I think these would have positive network effects to general society—making people more altruistic and society better functioning. I think we’re quite close to achieving this and that EAs could take deliberate efforts to accelerate this process. My argument was not well-received by the EA forum, I think largely because the idea is controversial and some of the researchers I cited were controvesial (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gaSHkEf3SnKhcSPt2/the-effective-altruist-case-for-using-genetic-enhancement-to).
The second-order considerations are definitely a problem once there is more widespread adoption. If only 0.001% of the population is using genetic enhancement, there are very little in the way of collective action problems. If a sizeable portion is using this technology, then we run into game theory. This is the topic of Jonathan Anomaly’s “Creating Future People”—which released a second edition yesterday. I will be reviewing it on my blog (most likely) rather soon. I am not sure if the EA forum would consider it relevant.
But if pure suffering elimination was the only thing that mattered, no one would be endangered, right? I am guessing there are some other factors you account for when valuing human lives?
I suspect we share very different ethical intuitions about the intrinsic value of non-human lives.
But even from an amoral perspective, this would be an issue because if a substantial number of engineered chickens pecked each other to death (which happens even now), it would reduce profitability and uptake of this method.
I partially agree, but even a couple of malevolent actor who enhance themselves considerably could cause large amounts of trouble. See this section of Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors.