Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸

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Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 24 Jun 2026 20:39 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸’s comment on: Carry out animal welfare interventions OR Research the effectiveness of animal welfare interventions
For what it’s worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so it’s plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we won’t know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I don’t think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until we’ve solved wild animal welfare science. There’s tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesn’t include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely there’s a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if we’re uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 24 Jun 2026 20:23 UTC
7 points
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on: Carry out animal welfare interventions OR Research the effectiveness of animal welfare interventions
I agree with Amanda’s basic thesis, but I don’t think “more research is absolutely essential” necessarily means “more research is the only thing that should get marginal funding.” Building an effective organization is very slow, expensive, and difficult, so even if an organization is carrying out plausibly net negative interventions now, it might be worth sustaining so there’s a vehicle ready to act on new evidence when it becomes available.
This doesn’t mean every animal org is too special to fail, just that functional, value-aligned orgs should be considered a valuable resource, and donors should consider the potential second-order effects of decreasing their support.
How much research is needed and what it takes to sustain an organization are hugely context-dependent, so I don’t mean my 50% vote very literally. Rather, I’m proposing it as prior that should be updated with context-specific information.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 18 Nov 2025 22:03 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
Thanks Siobhan!
I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation soon, but unfortunately I had a medical emergency and I’m still not feeling myself, so it might be another day or two until I have the headspace to reply to your comments. Thanks for your patience.
CC @Vasco Grilo🔸

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 18 Nov 2025 22:01 UTC
3 points
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on: Funding priorities for Wild Animal Initiative in 2026
Thanks so much to everyone who has engaged with this post! Just wanted to let you know that I had a medical emergency and unfortunately I’m still not feeling myself, so it might be another day or two until I have the headspace to reply to your comments. Thanks for your patience.
CC @SiobhanBall, @minthin, @Becca Rogers

Funding priorities for Wild Animal Initiative in 2026

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸18 Nov 2025 14:40 UTC

58 points

13 comments9 min readEA link

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 9:00 UTC
30 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[6 of 6] “What would make you know it’s not working?”
There are three levels at which you might answer this question:
(1) How would you know if field-building was the wrong strategy?
- If AI changes the nature of research so much that academia becomes irrelevant.
  - This seems the most plausible way our field-building strategy could be wrong, but so far we haven’t found a strategy that seems more robust to the huge uncertainties created by AI. If you have an idea for an alternative strategy that seems reasonably likely to be much more robust than field-building, please let us know, because this is an active area of strategic research for us.
- If someone finds a way to reduce suffering for ~trillions of wild animals that doesn’t require more research/technology (either to implement or to evaluate), that can be shown with high confidence to be net-positive even after accounting for effects on non-target species, and that seems likely to shift social norms toward caring explicitly about wild animal welfare over the long run.
- If there’s massive social change in favor of wild animal welfare—something like the way pollution and habitat destruction rapidly became issues of wide concern in the US between 1962 (when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring) and 1970 (when Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency and Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day). If that happened, it would be reasonable to expect an academic field to emerge somewhat organically, the way conservation biology did in the 1980s.
(2) How would you know if WAI’s efforts weren’t on track to succeed at field-building?
- This is the failure mode we invest the most in monitoring. We’re tracking a wide range of metrics related to field growth and indicators related to our causal impact. We’re still building up that system (collecting historical data, deciding which metrics are most relevant, etc.), but we hope to have an easily shareable dashboard sometime early in 2026. For now, I suggest looking at the supporting documents in Animal Charity Evaluators’ 2025 recommendation of WAI to get a more detailed look at how we approach monitoring and evaluation.
(3) How would you know if the field wasn’t on track to lead to real change for animals?
- We think it this will be pretty hard to get data on before the field is more established (i.e., at least another 5 years), because as long as the community is still evolving, its present form isn’t necessarily representative of its long-term state.
- For now, we’re looking for positive indications that our priorities are increasingly represented within the field: valuing highly abundant populations/taxa, researching invertebrates, considering counterfactuals, being open to human interference in nature, accounting for the possibility of net-negative lives, etc.
- Negative signs might include indications that some sort of sub-optimal culture is dominating and self-perpetuating (particularly concerning if the culture represents a relatively small part of society at large, because that would suggest our field is actively selecting for it, rather than failing to filter it out). For example, wildlife management science was heavily populated by hunters and anglers until recently; veterinary medicine is primarily funded by animal ag interests and continues to have a strong pro-farming culture. (I don’t know to what extent these particular trends in academic subcultures exist outside the US.)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 7:55 UTC
15 points
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on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[5 of 🧵] Re adding a campaigning arm:
P.S. To shift gears for a moment: if it were up to me, I’d keep WAI primarily a research organisation; but I’d add a small, focused campaigning arm to push for welfare improvements informed by that research.
I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, but for now I’ll just say:
1. I totally agree the movement should have something like this (thought it would be most effective if separate from WAI).
2. There’s some really exciting news coming on this front, which will likely be announced within the next week or two. Keep your eyes on the EA Forum!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 7:48 UTC
27 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[4 of 6] “What conditions would trigger a move from foundational research to applied work?”
I really do like arbitrary binaries for things that obviously aren’t that simple (“all models are wrong, but some are useful”!), but in this particular case I think the binary might actually be too reductive to be useful. Still, I’ll attempt to give a direct answer once I’ve done some quibbling.
First of all, applied work is already happening. There are many things people are doing to wild animals (typically for anthropocentric or biodiversity conservation reasons) that seem quite plausibly helpful for welfare (e.g., continuing to reduce the range of the New World screwworm). The difficulty is in determining whether these these interventions have net-positive effects once indirect effects on non-target species are accounted for. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything for wild animals until we’re absolutely certain about the nature of the impact we’re having. After all, everything that changes human or animal populations (e.g., distributing anti-malarial bednets, reducing factory farming) also has indirect effects on wild animals. So I think it’s best to think of applied work not as something that will suddenly become possible, but rather something we’ll gradually be able to do more strategically, confidently, and cost-effectively as science progresses.
Secondly, the need for foundational research won’t necessarily go down for a long time, because answering some foundational questions will make it newly possible to address other foundational questions. Implementing progressively more ambitious interventions will certainly raise plenty of applied questions, which might themselves expose important gaps in foundational knowledge. While I realize this sounds like the classic researcher whose head is so far up their own ass the only words they can still get out are “more research is needed!”, my thinking on this is actually more informed by my experience as an animal activist and what I’ve read about the history of the movement. As its focus shifted from pets to lab animals to farmed vertebrates to farmed invertebrates, the animal advocacy movement has repeatedly needed to consult more areas of science to inform its goals and tactics. I don’t have a good sense of how often that raised truly foundational scientific questions, but at least right now the movement is greatly constrained by the lack of basic scientific (and even philosophical!) understanding of the nature of sentience, which seems extremely important to determining which invertebrates fall within the moral circle.
I’m not saying there’s an infinite need for more research. Rather, I think we should acknowledge that research is likely to be a core function of the wild animal advocacy for the foreseeable future, and we shouldn’t expect the need for foundational research to consistently go down as the opportunities for applied work increase.
For Wild Animal Initiative’s part, we plan to continue pursuing both basic and applied research for the foreseeable future, and we hope the amount of resources devoted to that will continue to increase in absolute terms. In relative terms, we hope the proportion of the movement’s resources spent on research generally declines over time, as research reveals more and more pathways for applied work. But we think most of that work should be done by other organizations. As a scientific organization that isn’t part of an academic institution, it’s essential for us to maintain credible in the eyes of scientists, and tying ourselves to particular campaigns or policies increases the risk that we will be seen as putting “an agenda” ahead of the pursuit of the truth. That risk could be mitigated, so we continue to explore strategies that involve us branching out. Our rule of thumb for now is we want to be involved in applied work when we can clearly position ourselves as scientific advisors to a project others are leading, as we’re currently doing in our collaborations with Conservation X Labs (which will lead the rodent fertility control open innovation challenge, funding permitting) and the NYU WILD Lab (which works at the intersection of wild animal welfare science and municipal policymaking).
Finally, my attempt to answer your question directly: Given the aforebabbledabout fuzziness of the boundary between foundational and applied work, perhaps it would be useful to reformulate the question along these lines: “Under what conditions would we want the movement to be applying the majority of its resources to choosing and implementing interventions, rather than doing research that isn’t directly targeted at specific interventions?”
Perhaps those conditions would include:
- We have methods to empirically measure welfare within enough precision across a broad enough range of species that we can confidently make habitat-level land management decisions (i.e., is the total wellbeing of all the animals higher in cropland A or cropland B, forest C or forest D, cropland A or forest C, etc.). This isn’t strictly necessary to take action, but it would open up such a huge category of tractable actions that applied work would likely be able to absorb more resources than foundational work.
- Within wild animal welfare science and adjacent academic communities, there is a common understanding of welfare as something that is distinct from biodiversity, naturalness, economic value, or other values traditionally pursued by conservationists and other land managers. This would represent a major milestone on the path to a society that understands and values wild animal welfare enough for welfare to be a common consideration in policy discussions (similar to how ideas like biodiversity, carbon sequestration, or environmental justice factor into policy discussions now: rarely the single highest priority, but widely understood and treated as good things to advance when possible). Again, this isn’t necessary to take action, but the more widely welfare is understood and valued, the more likely it is that efforts to improve wild animal welfare will have positive long-term effects on social norms, which makes it more worthwhile to take action even if the short-term effects are uncertain.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 6:29 UTC
34 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
Stream-of-consciousness meta commentary I jotted down before writing my actual replies:
Can I just say: Hell fuckin’ yeah, let’s fuckin’ go, I fuckin’ love EA. This is the noblest possible use of the EA Forum: Bluntly calling people on their shit in a way that is not just polite but also deeply compassionate and clearly in good faith. I’m just so glad that my life path took me into a community that works together with this particular cocktail of conflict and collaboration. I love you guys :’)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 6:25 UTC
30 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[3 of 6] “When does WAI expect to produce its first real-world intervention or policy shift e.g. is there anything concrete expected this decade?”
Mandatory annoying disclaimer: For the reasons discussed in my preceding comment, I don’t think “time till first intervention implementation” is a useful proxy for the pace of field growth or the fidelity of its trajectory.
But to answer your question:
First past the post: Backyard bird habitat improvements in 1-2 years
WAI funded Ross MacLeod and colleagues to validate the use of eye temperature (assessed via thermal imaging) as an indicator of the welfare of several common bird species. If they find the metric to be usable as hypothesized, they can draw on over ten years of data they’ve collected from 54 backyard-like sites constructed to manipulate variables like bird feeder location, fencing presence/absence, and hedge species. If they find significant differences, Ross plans to use his longstanding relationships with the RSPCA and other UK bird groups to disseminate the first ever guidance on how bird lovers can set up their gardens to be more subjectively enjoyable for the birds that visit them.
Clearly this isn’t the most pressing issue facing wild animals, but happens to be on track to be the first of many cases where WAI-funded research identifies ways people can improve wild animal welfare by making simple changes to existing activities.
First high-confidence scalable intervention: Rodent fertility control in 4-7 years
Replacing anticoagulant rodenticides with oral contraceptives would remove a widespread source of intense, prolonged suffering. Because this would be modifying existing population management practices rather than changing an ecosystem in a novel way, fertility control offers an unusually convenient opportunity to reduce the suffering of a target population with minimal likelihood of affecting non-target populations.
Unfortunately, existing products have attracted more hype than the research supports, which has led to repeated failures of pilot projects launched by groups unaware of this track record.But because these compounds work in lab settings, there is strong reason to believe that an effective rodent contraceptive product can be developed (or that existing products could be made effective by following different application methodologies).
WAI has partnered with Conservation X Labs and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control to outline a process for running a research competition that would incentivize private R&D labs to close crucial knowledge gaps and develop a demonstrably effective product. If funding allows, we’ll launch this process in summer 2026. It will take at least a year or two to run the research competition, and likely several more years to get a new product to market.
Once an effective solution is commercially available, it can be applied at larger and larger scales as it is adopted across more cities, farms, factories, and conservation efforts (invasive rodents are a major threat to rare species on remote islands).
What links here?
- New donation opportunity: the Center for Wild Animal Welfare by Ben Stevenson (18 Nov 2025 18:26 UTC; 238 points)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 6:23 UTC
37 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[2 of 6] Why hasn’t WAI implemented interventions yet?
In short: Because that’s not what we’ve been trying to do.
If we had been spending the last six years trying to find interventions that could be implemented as soon as possible, and our progress to date is all we had to show for it, then that would be extremely disappointing. If that’s what we’d been aiming for and this is where we landed, then I think it’d be fair to say we failed — or at the very least, we definitely shouldn’t be an ACE-recommended charity.
What we have been doing instead is pursuing a strategy that is entirely focused on building wild animal welfare science up into a self-sustaining academic field that is positioned to produce the research needed to reduce wild animal suffering as much as possible over the long run.
I’m glad you brought up Rethink Priorities and Happier Lives Institute, because I think the contrast between us is very illustrative. Like most EA research orgs, RP and HLI mostly conduct research with the aim of directly informing policymaking, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Although the particular topics they’re focusing on are highly neglected, those topics are often close enough to longstanding human concerns (e.g., public health, agricultural productivity) that they can build on the deep bodies of literature that have been developed by mature academic fields (e.g., development economics, human psychology, farm animal veterinary medicine).
Wild animal welfare science is at best several decades behind those fields. The problem is not that potential interventions haven’t been evaluated yet; it’s that we lack the basic scientific knowledge of how to evaluate most interventions. The few interventions we can evaluate with confidence are evaluable precisely because they have very limited impacts or only work under a narrow set of conditions.
That’s why we have optimized for field-building over intervention research: not because there are no interventions worth trying now, but because there’s a very low ceiling to how much impact you can have before you know how to measure welfare across different several classes and phyla, how to account for compensatory mortality, how to predict and monitor for effects on non-target species, etc.
Which is not to say we have done no research on interventions. Rather, we have chosen to research interventions insofar as we think it will contribute to field growth, such as by attracting interest and funding, providing opportunities to refine research methodologies, building bridges with relevant research communities, or simply serving as a proof of concept for the field.
What links here?

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 Nov 2025 6:21 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Wild Animal Initiative: When does research become impact?
[1 of 6]
Hi Siobhan! Thanks so much for sharing your concerns and giving us a chance to explain our work!
I’m embarrassed to say I failed to find a brief way to answer your questions, so you’ll have to forgive my lengthy staggered replies. I’ve posted them in separate comments to allow for discussion to proceed in different directions across separate threads.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 30 Aug 2025 1:22 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nitin Sekar’s comment on: High-impact & urgent funding opportunity—Rodent fertility control
Thanks for calling that out, Nitin! I was worried my succinctness wasn’t giving them enough credit.
I’ve met several of your colleagues, and it’s clear they’re not pawns in your game. They are mission-driven people who are unusually clear-eyed about what they value, unusually ambitious about doing good, and unusually creative about how to do it. That seems to be a big part of why they’re taking steps most conservation orgs haven’t: they understand that responding to existential threats with appropriate urgency doesn’t rule out doing good in other ways (and that a tunnel-vision approach could actually make them less effective at achieving their top priority).
At the same time, I want to make sure we’re giving due credit to the huge number of other conservationists who care about animal welfare, yet don’t see those values reflected in the policies and priorities of their organizations (as you mention in your Science paper linked above; full text here). And to your CXL colleagues before you joined! It’s not that some people care about welfare and others don’t; it’s that institutional change requires more than good intentions. You also need someone to start conversations, make people feel psychologically safe enough to consider changing their minds, contribute domain expertise, and find where the levers of change are (at both the individual and organizational level). Oh, and the person doing that needs to be good at it—plenty have tried and failed, and not for lack of passion.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 30 Aug 2025 1:12 UTC
2 points
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on: High-impact & urgent funding opportunity—Rodent fertility control
Here’s a link to the full text of Nitin and Derek’s paper, from this part of Nitin’s post:
I worked for five years as WWF India’s national lead for elephant conservation, but I have also been active in wild animal welfare, publishing arguably the highest-profile peer-reviewed article on animal welfare in conservation and incorporating animal welfare into elephant conservation policy.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 28 Aug 2025 0:57 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Nitin Sekar’s comment on: High-impact & urgent funding opportunity—Rodent fertility control
I think it’s worth noting that Nitin did win a grant from the EA Animal Welfare Fund last year, but ended up turning it down to work at CXL (where he seemed likely to have a bigger impact, which seems to have been true).

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 27 Aug 2025 17:11 UTC
25 points
1 ∶ 0
on: High-impact & urgent funding opportunity—Rodent fertility control
I’m the executive director of @Wild_Animal_Initiative (WAI), one of CXL’s partners on this project, so I just wanted to weigh in to underscore how important this project is and how well-qualified Nitin is to lead it.
Rodent fertility control
Rodent fertility control is the near-term intervention we are most excited about, by far. In large part that’s because it advances progress on several levels at once:
- Directly reducing human-caused harm (i.e., slow, painful deaths by anticoagulant rodenticides) in the short term (i.e., starting in 1-7 years) at fairly large scales relative to other wild animal animal welfare interventions (i.e., hundreds of thousands to tens of millions a year, possibly much more once non-target species are accounted for).
- Growing the coalition of people, organizations, movements, and sectors involved in wild animal welfare work. In contrast to the edgelord thought experiments that originally popularized the idea of wild animal welfare within EA, rodent fertility control sits at an unusually convenient intersection of wild animal welfare (less rat torture), biodiversity conservation (fewer species literally going the way of the dodo), agriculture/manufacturing/food safety (fewer rats on farms, in factories, etc.), and human quality of life (fewer rats where people don’t want them). That’s helpful both for increasing the resources available to wild animal welfare work, and for shifting social norms toward caring more about wild animal welfare.
- Opening windows for policy work on wild animal welfare. Developing/validating an effective humane means of rodent fertility control would open up many angles for wild animal welfare advocates to make concrete, practical, non-controversial asks of policymakers. This would not only help scale up rodent fertility control, but it would help build out the policy arm of our movement, putting us in a better position to implement even larger-scale, lower-cost solutions as wild animal welfare science progresses.
- Pioneering a broadly applicable wildlife management strategy. Advancing rodent fertility control could lead to advancements in fertility control for other species as well, which would broaden the eventual impact of this work. Fertility control is not only promising for reducing lethal control. It could also be used to benefit more-wild populations that are currently being limited by intraspecific competition for food or other resources. Or it could be paired with wild animal welfare interventions that reduce mortality (e.g., oral rabies vaccination programs) so that reducing mortality doesn’t lead to population growth that could have negative effects on other populations.
Nitin
I would like to just briefly affirm that—while one of the many lovely things about the EA Forum is that any ol’ schmuck can walk in and contribute to the marketplace of ideas—Nitin isn’t any ol’ schmuck.
In the six years WAI has spent looking for natural scientists open to working on wild animal welfare, Nitin stands out as one of the field’s most promising champions yet. Since we first met in 2020 (when he and @Derek Shiller published their article in Science), it’s been clear that he’s deeply committed to anti-speciesist ethics and fascinated by the complexity of the ecological questions that raises.
On paper, Nitin seems like the perfect person to start welfare discussions in conservation spaces. In practice, he’s so good at it that he does it almost accidentally. This whole CXL-WAI-BIWFC collaboration grew out of a conversation he had with CXL colleagues at lunch one day. He brought up rodenticides—how much suffering they cause, how many native species they kill along the way—and before he knew it, he was talking to leadership about whether this is something they would really want the org to do. (At least, that’s my memory of how Nitin explained it to us when he reached out, with so much pleasant surprise he was almost apologetic, to notify us that our dreams of a rodent fertility control project might come to fruition much sooner than we’d expected.) Less accidentally, but more verifiably: He also started discussions at CXL that led to them adopting a plant-based food policy for the organization—a quicker pivot than even some animal advocacy organizations have been able to pull off.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he’s great to work with. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel interesting when you talk to him, even though you’re the one walking away learning more. He’s a strong writer, a clear thinker, a creative ideator, and a prompt emailer. Good ideas live or die by the talent of the people executing them, and Nitin’s got the chops to make good on donors’ investments in this project.
If you have any questions about Wild Animal Initiative’s perspective on this issue or this project, please don’t hesitate to reply here or email me at cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 11 Aug 2025 18:32 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Vaccinating raccoons against rabies: A case study in the potential cost-effectiveness of wild animal welfare interventions
I like that you estimated the cost-effectiveness, but I do not think it illustrates “animal welfare science could lead to the development of large-scale, highly cost-effective interventions”
I was worried I didn’t articulate this claim clearly enough in the original post, so I appreciate you giving me the chance to clarify!
I did not mean to say “This is highly cost-effective relative to other animal welfare interventions” or “This is about how cost-effective I expect wild animal welfare interventions to be.”
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.”
Wild Animal Initiative’s whole deal is advancing research that we think will lead to interventions that are orders of magnitude more scalable and more cost-effective than what’s possible now. Some people seem to think that’s hopeless, in part because it seems so far beyond what we can imagine now. We disagree. The goal of this post wasn’t to provide definitive proof for every part of that argument, but rather to provide an empirical reality check. Given how early we are in the history of wild animal welfare science, I think it’s a pretty encouraging sign that we’re already doing plausibly-helpful things that are within a few orders of magnitude of competitive cost-effectiveness.
[P.S. Still planning to reply to your point about soil animals, but ran out of time today.]

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 11 Aug 2025 18:05 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: crunk004’s comment on: Vaccinating raccoons against rabies: A case study in the potential cost-effectiveness of wild animal welfare interventions
Such a great question! If we were to do a more rigorous cost-effectiveness evaluation, this would be one of the first things we’d try to add to the model.
As is too often the case with cause-specific mortality, we couldn’t find any great data on this. But based on our quick read of the literature and our general knowledge of natural history, @Simon Eckerström Liedholm and I think the leading candidates for counterfactual causes of raccoon death might be:
- hunting and trapping (see, e.g., this study of raccoons in central Mississippi)
- vehicle collisions
- predation (by, e.g., coyotes, dogs, great-horned owls)
- other diseases (e.g. canine distemper virus)
- starvation
- extreme weather and accidents (e.g. falling out of trees)
There’s even less research on the relative amounts of suffering from different causes of death, but rabies is a pretty good candidate for one of the worst deaths out there, because it causes extreme suffering over several days. (It’s tragically convenient that humans die of rabies and exhibit similar symptoms, so we can back up our guesses with first-hand reports and observations of behavior in a species we know well.) Canine distemper might be worse, because it also causes intense suffering but can last for weeks.
But most of the likely most common causes of raccoon deaths act much more quickly (some almost instantaneously), it seems like a pretty safe bet that rabies is substantially worse than most other raccoon deaths.

Vaccinating raccoons against rabies: A case study in the potential cost-effectiveness of wild animal welfare interventions

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸7 Aug 2025 20:47 UTC

29 points

7 comments4 min readEA link

(www.wildanimalinitiative.org)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 7 Aug 2025 17:54 UTC
23 points
3 ∶ 3
on: Frog Welfare
Thank you for this important post!
I’d like to add that another important aspect of frog welfare is the welfare of frogs living in the wild, of which there might be something like hundreds of billions[1] to hundreds of trillions[2].[3]
I think the most tractable way to improve the welfare of as many wild frogs as soon as possible is to invest in efforts to establish the foundations of wild animal welfare science, explore avenues for translating wild animal welfare science into real-world policy change, and build grassroots support for such policies. Relevant orgs include:
- Wild Animal Initiative (where I work)
- NYU’s Wild Animal Welfare Program, including their newly launched WILD Lab
- Animal Ethics
- Rethink Priorities
[1] What’s a few Humanities’ worth of minds, between friends?
[2] Time flies when you’re counting seconds for hundreds of millennia!
[3] These estimates come from taking the total amphibian population estimates from Tomasik (2009) and Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo (2018) (Supplementary Material, page 39) and dividing them by 10. I don’t know if that’s reasonable—I just know there are way more salamanders out there than you’d think. My guess is it’s conservative, i.e., that frogs account for more than 10% of amphibians.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸

Fund­ing pri­ori­ties for Wild An­i­mal Ini­ti­a­tive in 2026

Vac­ci­nat­ing rac­coons against ra­bies: A case study in the po­ten­tial cost-effec­tive­ness of wild an­i­mal welfare interventions

Funding priorities for Wild Animal Initiative in 2026

Vaccinating raccoons against rabies: A case study in the potential cost-effectiveness of wild animal welfare interventions