Hereās a link to the full text of Nitin and Derekās paper, from this part of Nitinās post:
I worked for five years as WWF Indiaās 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.
I think itās 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).
Iām the executive director of @Wild_Animal_Initiative (WAI), one of CXLās 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 thatās 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/āmanufacturing/āfood safety (fewer rats on farms, in factories, etc.), and human quality of life (fewer rats where people donāt want them). Thatās 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/āvalidating 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 doesnāt lead to population growth that could have negative effects on other populations.
Nitin
I would like to just briefly affirm thatāwhile one of the many lovely things about the EA Forum is that any olā schmuck can walk in and contribute to the marketplace of ideasāNitin isnāt any olā 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 fieldās most promising champions yet. Since we first met in 2020 (when he and @Derek Shiller published their article in Science), itās been clear that heās 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, heās 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 rodenticidesāhow much suffering they cause, how many native species they kill along the wayāand before he knew it, he was talking to leadership about whether this is something they would really want the org to do. (At least, thatās 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 weād expected.) Less accidentally, but more verifiably: He also started discussions at CXL that led to them adopting a plant-based food policy for the organizationāa quicker pivot than even some animal advocacy organizations have been able to pull off.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, heās great to work with. Heās the kind of person who makes you feel interesting when you talk to him, even though youāre the one walking away learning more. Heās 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 Nitinās got the chops to make good on donorsā investments in this project.
If you have any questions about Wild Animal Initiativeās perspective on this issue or this project, please donāt hesitate to reply here or email me at cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org.
I like that you estimated the cost-effectiveness, but I do not think it illustrates āanimal welfare science could lead to the development of large-scale, highly cost-effective interventionsā
I was worried I didnāt 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 āThis is highly cost-effective relative to other animal welfare interventionsā or āThis is about how cost-effective I expect wild animal welfare interventions to be.ā
I was aiming for something more like: āI donāt think itās crazy to think we could develop highly cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions, because hereās an example of a program that wasnāt even optimized for wild animal welfare but still seemed to be doing likely-good things fairly affordably.ā
Wild Animal Initiativeās whole deal is advancing research that we think will lead to interventions that are orders of magnitude more scalable and more cost-effective than whatās possible now. Some people seem to think thatās hopeless, in part because it seems so far beyond what we can imagine now. We disagree. The goal of this post wasnāt 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 itās a pretty encouraging sign that weāre 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.]
Such a great question! If we were to do a more rigorous cost-effectiveness evaluation, this would be one of the first things weād try to add to the model.
As is too often the case with cause-specific mortality, we couldnāt find any great data on this. But based on our quick read of the literature and our general knowledge of natural history, @Simon Eckerstrƶm 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)
Thereās 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. (Itās 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.
Thank you for this important post!
Iād 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)
NYUās Wild Animal Welfare Program, including their newly launched WILD Lab
[1] Whatās a few Humanitiesā worth of minds, between friends?
[2] Time flies when youāre 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 donāt know if thatās reasonableāI just know there are way more salamanders out there than youād think. My guess is itās conservative, i.e., that frogs account for more than 10% of amphibians.
You make a great point about the parallel to the meat-eater problem, and I agree that, for similar reasons, itās probably still a good idea to advocate for chicken welfare reforms.
However, I donāt think reductio ad absurdum is a compelling argument in this case.
This postās argument seems absurd not because it leads to some kind of internal contradiction, but rather because it argues for something thatās way outside the things people normally think are good ideas. I donāt think āseems absurd to most peopleā is a reliable indicator of āis not ethically sound,ā because I think many people believe things and act in ways that are not morally sound (e.g., factory farming). What I love about EA is that itās a social space that encourages questioning of conventional ideas.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful post, Vasco! It is so heartening to see people taking arthropod welfare seriously.
While I agree that chicken welfare reforms could plausibly harm arthropods more than they help chickens, I donāt think that means we shouldnāt support chicken welfare reforms. For the same reason I reject the meat-eater problem, the logic of the larder, and the logic of the logger, I think that to get to a society that maximizes utility over the long term, we will probably need to take some steps that decrease utility in the short term.
That is, I donāt know exactly what global-scale arthropod welfare programs would look like, but I think weāre more likely to get there if more people live in material abundance, so I think economic development is worthwhile even if it increases factory farming in the short term. I think reforming, regulating, and banning factory farming are also very likely to be helpful (and possibly necessary) for human society to normalize and institutionalize concern for non-human animals, and to invest substantial resources in helping them.
I realize this is a suspiciously convenient conclusion to come to, and I canāt rule out the possibility that my position is driven by motivated reasoning. But I think itās a good sign that my claim (āChicken welfare reforms might be good overall, even if they hurt arthropods in the short termā) uses a similar logic to yours (āChicken welfare reforms might be bad overall, even if they help chickens directlyā). Both are examples of finding a different conclusion as a result of changing the scope of the analysis: Should our calculations include just chickens directly affected, or also arthropods indirectly affected, or also farmed and wild animals very-indirectly affected?
Of course one could agree with me that we should include the very-indirectly-affected animals, but disagree with my guesses about what would be best for them. One of the biggest weaknesses of my approach is that itās much harder to judge what kinds of are worthwhile, or to compare effectiveness across efforts. It also takes things further from ecology and more into social movement theory, which is annoying because I enjoy the former a lot more than the latter.
But that doesnāt mean we should abandon empiricism and settle for hand-waviness in everything. Analyses like yours can be very useful; I just think we should interpret their results in the context of explicit theories of change about long-term effects.
My understanding is that TNF hasnāt posted a list because at least one of the charities felt it would be a PR risk for them to be named in association with this commitment. But one could roughly deduce it by looking at which 2023 OP grantees (a) received recurring grants from the OP Farmed Animal Welfare Program and (b) werenāt working on farmed vertebrates.
Section 4 (āThe weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuffā) argues that perceptions of the weirdness of a given cause or intervention ācreate blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement.ā
Insofar as this is true, itās important to know the degrees of perceived weirdness. To my pleasant surprise, Iāve found that wild animal welfare seems much less weird to most people than it does to most EAs. This is based on my experience working at Wild Animal Initiative for the last five years, hearing my colleaguesā reports of their conversations with people (primarily scientists), and generally talking about it at every chance I get (both with EAs and non-EAs).
Apologies for the forthcoming generalizations about EAs. Iām trying to describe general patterns; Iām not trying to flatten everyone into one caricature.
In my experience, EAs often explain wild animal welfare along these lines: āNature is really brutal. The animals with the worst lives are the most numerous. We should destroy habitat or eliminate predators.ā
In contrast, my colleagues and I have settled on an approach thatās closer to this: āYou seem like you care about animals. So do we. People talk a lot about human harms to animals, but thereās so much we donāt know about naturally occurring harms. We think it would be good to protect wild animals from things like disease or starvation if we could. But ecosystems are really complicated, so thatās why weāre focused on doing research first.ā
It turns out most people respond really well to that. In fact, our biggest communication challenge is not people thinking weāre too weird, but rather people not thinking weāre weird enough. That is, āreducing wild animal sufferingā sounds a lot like āprotecting endangered species.ā They get the overlap quickly; itās the differences that take longer to explain.
In my experience, most EA discussions of wild animal welfare focus on extreme thought experiments, extreme interventions, and core philosophical principles. My hypothesis is that thatās largely because of a temperamental inclination toward abstraction and consistency, which is why many of us (including me) like to steer conversations toward areas of deepest disagreement or highest uncertainty.
Turns out thereās no rule that says you have to single out whatever someone loves most and declare it must be wiped from this earth. The thought experiments and zany interventions are also of only limited usefulness, because theyāre almost completely untethered from the considerations that will guide the next steps of research and movement-building.
So we and other researchers in the field mostly discuss things that are both more palatable and more achievable in the near term (or at least representative of how we might do things in the near term, which āfeeding lions cultivated meat via dronesā is not): vaccination against diseases, contraception to prevent starvation, promoting habitats/āland uses that host populations with higher total welfare than the alternatives, reducing sources of stress, etc.
I think most people in the industrialized West like wildlife. It seems like the default is people seeing themselves on the same side as animals (e.g., happy to see them at all, sad to see them suffer), and exceptions come when people come into direct conflict with animals (urban pest species, predators of livestock, etc.). Crucially, these attitudes seem to be not just about preferences (āI like animalsā), but also tied into identity at a very basic, nonpartisan level: āIām the kind of person who appreciates wildlife,ā āNice people are nice to animals,ā etc. Iāve singled out āanimalsā here, but in reality these preferences and identities tend to bundle animals and nature into one, and ānatureā is whatās mentioned more often: āNature is beautiful,ā āIām the kind of person who respects nature,ā etc.
Before I got involved in EA, I had only ever met a handful of people who disliked nature. (They were all kidsāI was also a kidāwho grew up in densely urban areas, and their main issue seemed to be with bugs, particularly mosquitoes.) Now that Iām deep in the EA bubble and talking about nature a lot, Iāve met tons of EAs who say theyāve always disliked nature: they thought it was obviously cruel, harsh, unwelcoming, gross, etc. (I even met one person who said they didnāt even understand why anyone thought natural vistas looked beautiful until a psychedelic experience gave them that experience for the first time.) Either I grew up super sheltered (likely true), or EA has a way of attracting weirdos (definitely trueāagain, I offer myself as evidence).
Another thing that causes many EAs to underestimate how willingāhow excitedāmost people are to help wildlife is their experiences advocating for farmed animals. Most people have very different attitudes toward farmed animals than wild animals, and they have a vested interest in not changing what they eat or how our economy works. As Henry points out, mocking vegans is a cultural norm, and sometimes even part of peopleās identities. Fortunately, when asked to help wild animals, people donāt interpret that as an attack on their integrity or their lifestyle, so they donāt have the same defensive reaction.
That was wordier than I expected. All I really wanted to say is I know we can make āmass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from diseaseā sound pretty weird, but most people think āprotecting wildlife from diseasesā sounds like a pretty good idea. There are still lots of challenges to people fully understanding, accepting, and improving wild animal welfare, but we shouldnāt make those challenges out to be worse than they are.
Would you mind expanding on your comment? I donāt know what exactly you mean by it.
A few thoughts related to wild animals
General: Thanks so much for mentioning wild animals! They make up such a large majority of animals that I think itās a really good practice to allude to that part of the picture even when you donāt want to cover it in depth.
Dodging the question: There are many interventions that would only be beneficial if you knew whether animals in the affected population(s) had net-positive or net-negative lives on average. But Iāve had so many conversations with people who seem to think we canāt do anything until we answer that question. In fact, there are lots of things we can do. Anything that reduces suffering without changing population levels is worthwhile, because between two lives not worth living, Iād still prefer the one that has less pain.
Evolution: Hereās a great talk by my colleague that goes in depth into depth on fitness and happiness in the context of wild animal welfare. Itās totally consistent with the arguments you make on the subject. https://āāwww.wildanimalinitiative.org/āāblog/āāwhat-is-fitness
Contraception: Youāre right that wildlife contraception could be a great tool for humanely reducing populations, and that that would be in animalsā interest if those animals were living net-negative lives. I want to add that one of the reasons contraception has so much potential is you can also use it to reduce suffering even if animals are living net-positive lives. Here are two strategies you could use to improve net welfare without knowing the net value of animalsā experiences.
Strategy 1: Same population, less suffering. You could use contraception as an alternative to painful lethal methods of population control. For example, cities, farms, factories, etc. often manage rat populations with anticoagulant poisons that cause the animals to bleed out over hours or days. You could eliminate the need for that by using contraception (itās not quite clear whether the tech is there yet, but itās closeāthis is one of the things we [@Wild_Animal_Initiative] would like more funding to research). People would probably want to bring the population down as much as possible, but they might decide to keep it at the same level as it was when they were using poison, and you would still expect a net benefit to welfare.
Strategy 2: Optimal population density (see this white paper with neat charts). Assuming you think more good lives is a good thing, all else equal, in reality not all else is equal when a population grows. Many wild animal populations are constrained by resource (e.g. food) availability: the population grows and competition intensifies until deaths from competition (e.g. starvation) increase the total mortality rate to the point where it equals the birth rate. So by the time the population stabilizes, resource competition is intense, and quality of life is likely affected. Even if these animals were having good lives, it might be better for there to be slightly fewer of them if that meant theyād be having much better lives. And if it turns out the animals were having net-negative lives, then reducing their population would be good for the usual reasons.
You might be interested in this talk on what exactly fitness means in an evolutionary context and why we shouldnāt expect it to reliably select for traits that give wild animals happy lives: https://āāwww.wildanimalinitiative.org/āāblog/āāwhat-is-fitness
I agree! I erred on the side of dryness in the post because Iām really worried that āgood newsā will be misinterpreted as āokay everything is fine now.ā
But that doesnāt mean this isnāt worth celebrating! Itās freakinā awesome!! Easily a contender for the biggest karmic harvest any philanthropist has reaped this year.
Itās especially impressive given that the Navigation Fund is so new, yet they were willing and able to make a big fast pivot. I donāt know what exactly it entailed for them, but I can say Iāve learned from Wild Animal Initiativeās Grants Program that both setting up grant-making systems and administering grants are way more administratively complicated and time-consuming than I ever thought it would be. So Iām guessing it was no small undertaking for a small team in its first year of grant-making. Thank you TNF!
Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I havenāt read them yet): https://āāfaunalytics.org/āācompensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/āā
The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that itās really hard to do well, because (a) itās really hard to know when youāre comparing apples to apples and (b) thereās strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didnāt end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! Iāll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didnāt want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesnāt respond to this comment, donāt take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didnāt find it compelling. Hereās my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we donāt know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theoryāthereās stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because itās unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: Youāre right that for many social movements, more academic research isnāt what will change peopleās minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think thatās outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So itās worth working harder to help them.
Staff salaries
Actual salaries: Our salaries currently range from $60,000 to $104,000. Hereās how we set salaries.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but thatās typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because thatās where thereās the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. Theyāre also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if theyāre really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world arenāt like that, and our day-to-day work doesnāt offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we donāt want to limit ourselves to those. (Weād also rather not take advantage of those peopleās lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. Thatās what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they donāt have to provide for others in their family and they donāt have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So itās more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then itās still cost-effective.
* Edit: āCurrently calls for middle-class knowledge workersā sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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Thanks for calling that out, Nitin! I was worried my succinctness wasnāt giving them enough credit.
Iāve met several of your colleagues, and itās clear theyāre 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 theyāre taking steps most conservation orgs havenāt: they understand that responding to existential threats with appropriate urgency doesnāt 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 weāre giving due credit to the huge number of other conservationists who care about animal welfare, yet donāt 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! Itās not that some people care about welfare and others donāt; itās 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 itāplenty have tried and failed, and not for lack of passion.