Recently, I have come across a growing number of speculations suggesting that wild animals lead net negative lives. Proponents of this view typically refer to insects, arthropods, invertebrates, or species with r-selective reproductive strategies. The conclusion they draw is usually that we should aim to reduce their numbers in one way or another. Unfortunately, birth control is seldom discussed in this context. Habitat destruction appears to be the preferred method.
There is, of course, some value in speculating about virtually any topic in science. What troubles me is that such speculations may be mistaken for established theories, particularly given the way they are presented to broader audiences through public forums, podcasts, and YouTube videos.
The central argument typically runs as follows: animals with r-selective reproductive strategies produce many offspring, of which only a few survive. The experience of a usually violent death therefore constitutes a large proportion of their lives.
This argument rests on two assumptions:
- The experience of death itself is something terrible.
- The experience of death actually makes up a significant proportion of those animals' lives.
I want to push back against both assumptions.
First Assumption: Is a Violent Death Really That Bad?
When I contemplate my own death, I consider it tragic for three main reasons:
- All the good experiences I will never have again.
- The grief it will bring to family and friends.
- It will prevent me from doing good in the world.
In short, I want to live as long as possible, provided I remain in reasonable health. By contrast, the manner in which I die — whether torn apart by wild animals, burned alive, or passing away in my sleep — seems to matter relatively little in the grand scheme of things. This excludes prolonged suffering, such as the kind caused by serious illness factory farming or some insecticides.
So why do I assign so little weight to the experience of death itself?
In a life-or-death situation, the pain system tends to shut down as long as the body remains in fight-or-flight mode. And since we are discussing scenarios that end in death, there is no subsequent trauma to recover from.
A personal account
When I was fourteen, I was hit by a car and hovered between life and death for roughly half an hour before losing consciousness. I woke up three weeks later in hospital. Since I would not have survived without intensive medical care, and since we are concerned here with subjective experience rather than outcome, this episode serves as a useful proxy for a death experience.
How did I experience it?
First, I was struck by something I could not immediately identify — it felt no worse than bumping one's head. My immediate instinct was to get up and continue on my bike. Fortunately, my trainer held me down, correctly suspecting a spinal injury. I insisted I was fine; the car had barely touched me, I told him. They showed me the wreckage of my bike to convince me otherwise. That, by far, was the worst part of the entire experience. I was also concerned about my mother having to come and collect me — until they mentioned they had already called a helicopter, at which point I became genuinely euphoric. I also felt a slight pang of guilt about the cost to taxpayers — though, in my mind, this seemed entirely disproportionate, since I remained firmly convinced that it had been nothing more than a scratch.
When the doctor arrived, he administered an injection, and everything went dark. Despite three fractured vertebrae, several other broken bones, and a lung injury that nearly killed me, I did not experience a single moment of pain. To put it in utilitarian terms: if I assigned a value of −100 to the worst experience of my life — being left by someone I loved — this entire episode would rate no more than −1. And I am not unusual in this regard.
This suggests an ironic implication for negative utilitarians: by the same logic used to argue that r-selected animals lead net negative lives, one might conclude that humans are among the most unfortunate species of all, given how frequently we fall in love and are disappointed. That conclusion would, of course, be overly simplistic — just as it is overly simplistic to focus exclusively on reproductive strategy.
Second Assumption: Does the experience of dead make up a big part of an Animal's Life?
This claim is repeated so often, in one form or another, that it risks being accepted as fact. Yet I have never seen anyone provide actual figures to support it.
To calculate the proportion of the death experience in an animal's life, we would need to know two things: when consciousness begins, and how long the dying process lasts. Consider the following examples:
- Animal A is a small invertebrate whose consciousness began one week, or 604,800 seconds, before hatching. She lived undisturbed inside her egg and was eaten immediately upon hatching. The entire dying process lasted one second. That amounts to 1/604,800 of her life — the remainder was, by any reasonable assessment, a peaceful existence.
- Animal B is a human who lived for eighty years and experienced severe cancer pain for one month. That month represents roughly 1/960 of his life — and yet it also included the psychological burden of knowing he was going to die, something probably unavailable to most non-human animals.
These are deliberately simplified examples. No one can say with confidence when consciousness begins in a given individual animal, let alone across categories as broad as arthropods or invertebrates. But that is precisely the point: we should not treat a hypothesis as an established theory when no data exists to support it.
Why this idea is dangerous
To my knowledge, there is a strong consensus among researchers working with arthropods that preserving these animals is of critical importance. Yet a small number of proponents of the opposite view have already gained notable traction, and there are reasons to think this could accelerate.
1.Algorithms favour controversial ideas.
2. Such proponents may present themselves as uniquely concerned with animal welfare rather than ecological function.
3. Industries involved in habitat destruction may find it in their best interest to promote a narrative that makes their activities appear less harmful.
It is unlikely that the general public will ever broadly accept the idea that reducing animal populations constitutes a form of welfare intervention. Nevertheless, even the perception that a scientific debate exists on this question may be enough to reduce public motivation to engage in conservation efforts — and that outcome alone warrants taking the argument seriously.
Hey Hans, thanks for posting!
I'm pushing back on this in case anyone new to the issue is reading.
Both of the assumptions you raise are ~empirical and can be investigated. We can investigate the release of painkilling chemicals into the body during trauma, and we can estimate the % of life that a death takes up for different animals. We can't confidently make claims in either direction without research - especially not based on anecdotes.
In my view, the claims you argue against shouldn't be referred to as 'assumptions'. These claims are usually made on the basis of investigation and argument, and are explicitly not the assumptions on which an argument rests. In fact they are generally treated as important cruxes (especially the disutility of a violent death).
Overall this is a nice first engagement with the issue, but I'd encourage you to look into existing research more before forming too strong a take.
If you want to engage more deeply (this is for readers too), I reckon this post is a great place to start. In it, Michael Plant makes a similar case to yours, but in even more detail.
The post you recommended seems like a very nice outline of the premises in (wild) animal welfare and problem with being able to tell how good an animal's life is, and how that measures up in the grand scheme of things. It is unfortunately dense and long and from 10 years ago, but it make me see this is well-trodden ground and left me wanting to know what the more recent developments are.
Edit: I want to add that the tone of this comment felt dismissive to me when I first read it. I think I'm sensitive to being considered shallow for disagreeing so the word choices of "if you are new" and "this is a nice first engagement...to engage more deeply...is a great place to start" set me off. I've read a bit. I have heard some counter arguments. I'm not completely uninformed. I'm unconvinced. (So far.)
Hey Tandena, thanks for raising this. I do think in retrospect that the comment was a bit patronising. Apologies.
I also now worry that this comment will also seem patronising. I'd appreciate that feedback if it does - I'm considering getting a bit more involved in promoting good quality content through commenting, but it's a hard line to tread.
Yep, I started looking for other posts and then realised it would take too long for me to justify it. It's worth spending some time with an LLM finding more readings, there is a lot of good stuff here.
I was writing the comment kind of specifically for someone in this position to see. I think that it isn't a good post to read if you are still exploring the question; the arguments are forceful, appealing and engaging but uninformed in pretty crucial areas, meaning that overall they can be misleading. I wrote the comment because it seemed like the post was getting disproportionate attention given this fact, and might therefore be taken as having more authority than it does.
To be clear, my first posts on the Forum were of similar quality or worse, and I'm glad the author posted this. I hope that Hans keeps exploring the question and posting.
Thank you for sharing the link. I completely agree that MichaelPlant articulated this position far better than I did, and I highly recommend reading his post. I suspect mine gained so much traction not necessarily because of its quality, but because the issue itself is of paramount importance. Getting these things right is crucial, even if it often feels like an impossible task.
Thanks Hans, and yes you're absolutely right, I agree this is a crucial issue.
I did not find this patronizing! I recognize that this is a charged topic and really appreciate you moving the discussion to higher quality format/content. Don't overthink too much, I am one person and being a little neurotic. You cleared the air.
I've probably missed quite a lot. I'm aware of this article about how animals die and the signs of distress very small animals exhibit. Gonna take your advice and try to get up to speed to see what I've missed.
Why is the idea that insects have net negative lives dangerous, but the idea that they have net positive lives isn't dangerous? If you promote the idea that they have net positive lives when in fact they're net negative, you could end up doing tremendous harm.
I think it's fine to make arguments that insects' lives are positive on balance, but I reject the framing of "dangerousness". You are too quick to jump from "insects' lives are net positive" to "...and it should be taboo to argue otherwise".
I agree that both positions carry real risks. Classical utilitarian concepts like "net positive" or "net negative" lives don't seem very helpful here. We simply don't have the data to make even an educated guess, let alone a proper calculation.
There are several frameworks that might serve us better: preference utilitarianism, for one: insects clearly exhibit a preference to live. Or the "do no harm" principle. Or basic moral intuition: killing healthy individuals is not normally considered a way of helping them. And then there's the precautionary principle: driving species to extinction is irreversible, and it is virtually impossible to reduce insect populations at scale without doing exactly that.
I don't think arguing for net negative lives should be taboo quite the contrary. As I argued in my original post, speculative ideas have value, as long as they are presented as such. My concern is that some proponents of this view have moved beyond speculation and are now acting on it as if it was an established theory.
One example: on March 25, Bob Fischer and Rethink Priorities published a database of near-term interventions for wild animal welfare. Entry number three: "Biofuel subsidies as a mechanism for reducing invertebrate populations" uses the word reducing as a euphemism for killing insects through pesticides and habitat destruction. To be fair, the authors concluded that the EA community is not well-placed to intervene here. But the fact that they considered ways to accelerate such subsidies rather than oppose them suggests they view killing these animals as a good thing.
Should this view be silenced? No. They have freedom of speech, just as I do. But it's our job to push back. Good intentions don't earn anyone a free pass. A bug doesn't care whether it's killed for profit or for its own supposed benefit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Hi Hans.
I think @Bob Fischer generally opposes decreasing the population of wild arthropods given the large uncertainty about whether they have positive or negative lives. Bob said the following on 25 March 2026.
Then I argued that it is unclear whether biofuel subsidies increase or decrease the number of macroarthropods, which were the animals covered in the shallow analysis. So I would not support biofuel subsidies even if I was certain that macroarthropods have negative lives, and neglected effects on other animals (in particular, microarthropods and nematodes). In reality, I believe biofuel subsidies are even less promising. I have practically no idea about whether macroarthropods have positive or negative lives, and I can see effects on macroarthropods being much larger or smaller than effects on microarthropods or nematodes. I think the priority should be decreasing the uncertainty about effects on soil invertebrates (for example, determining which have positive or negative lives for each biome), and welfare comparisons across species.
I'm glad Bob holds this view and I didn't want to single him out negatively. In fact I think his work is tremendously important. I especially appreciated the animal welfare table he co-authored, and in the same database there are interventions actually aimed at saving animals, like number 5: "Climate-friendly technologies and invertebrate mortality."
I still find it alarming that the research question in this particular case was something along the lines of "Can we assist in bringing invertebrate numbers down by accelerating subsidies?" instead of "Can we save lives by opposing these subsidies?"
I totally agree that research should be a main focus. It stops being effective altruism when one part of the community puts their effort into saving invertebrates while another part wants to kill those same animals.
What would actually convince you that a certain species lives a "net negative life"? Or that it lives a particular good life?
I agree (with both sentences). Here is the table.
I am open to exploring ways of increasing and decreasing the population of wild invertebrates. I guess the probability of these having positive/negative lives is roughly 50 %.
Great.
I see effective altruism as a question. Different people will necessarily arrive at different answers, and these may often diverge significantly. I would rather welcome everyone into the community based on their methods, not specific answers. I believe this tends to lead to better final answers due to stimulating discussions among people with diverse views.
What do you think about interventions which save human lives very cost-effectively, but may decrease the number of wild invertebrates a lot? I estimate GiveWell's top charities decrease 539 M soil-invertebrate-years per $, although I am very uncertain about whether they increase or decrease the population of soil invertebrates.
To be honest, I’m surprised you’re giving them a 50% chance of a net-positive life while equating one second of 'excruciating pain' to 24 hours of 'healthy life.' While that distinction might have seemed minor in our previous discussion, it’s of paramount importance here.
Pain perception is highly subjective and, more importantly, something one can adapt to. Consider someone with no experience in sports: getting tapped by a stray volleyball on a schoolyard might feel like a major ordeal. Meanwhile, a goalkeeper taking a 100km/h shot to the face will insist it was a great experience because they made the save. Even they might look soft compared to a Thai boxer, who will literally laugh in their opponent's face after taking a heavy hit.
Now guess who does crazy Thai boxer look up to? Wild animals. They are tough as nail as Marc Bekoff puts it in his masterpiece Wild Justice. If we must anthropomorphize, we should at least use empirical data from people who are actually accustomed to pain. Judging the lives of wild animals by the standards of academics used to a sedentary lifestyle is arguably the biggest mistake we could make.
Furthermore, we should always err on the side of caution. If we are designing a vaccination program, assuming the disease is devastating to them because it would be devastiting to us is a reasonable baseline. But if we are contemplating something as extreme as zoocide, we had better be absolutely certain that their lives aren't worth living by their standards, not ours.
A typically painful experience may become less painful via training. In addition, even if it remains significantly painful, people could still consider it worth it for other reasons (like helping their team win).
I meant that I guess the probability of wild invertebrates having positive/negative lives is roughly 50 % from their own perspective, which I agree is what matters. Imagine wild invertebrates have a welfare (from their own perspective) per animal-year of -1 (on some scale) with probability 99 %, and 1 with probability 1 %. Their expected welfare per animal-year would be -0.98 (= 0.99*(-1) + 0.01*1). Would you still oppose decreasing their population because it is not certain that their lives are negative? If not because it would be almost certain that they have negative lives, how low would the probability of them having negative lives have to be for you to oppose decreasing their population? Why any particular value? I would want to increase/decrease their population as long as they had a positive/negative expected welfare per animal-year if there were no more options besides changing their population. In practice, I think decreasing the very large uncertainty about whether they have positive or negative lives is a better option than changing their population.
I think this is a brilliant contrast to the usual insect welfare discussion. I hope it sparks descriptions of some different possibilities.
The usual argument as I understand it, is that lives cut short is a Very Bad Thing. So when animals "die young" they have unfulfilled potential and traumatic lives. I don't think that's the correct way to look at it. Unfortunately, I don't know what the correct way to look at it is. A hypothetical way to frame it, is that most insects have average lifespans, but they have the potential to achieve an almost god-like existence (for an insect). Another hypothetical framing is that daily life eating and sleeping and growing is pretty fulfilling, and the short amount of time spent suffering from dying doesn't counteract that. Another hypothetical framing is that r-strategists find immense meaning in competition as it is such a huge part of their life history, and we wouldn't be able to understand it. I don't think these are obviously wrong nor do I think the going EA framing is obviously correct.
I fully believe that things we think is terrible are likely to be experienced very differently for other organisms. I have a couple reasons for this. One is that we live very comfortable safe lives and this has skewed our perception of how bad bad things are. (and made good things look pretty bland too!) This is especially strong when it comes to pain. I think pain isn't as bad as we think and we have mistakenly amped this up beyond all reason. People today are afraid of tiny amounts of pain. I don't think animals have the same outlook. Mindset is a huge determinant of pain.
Another is that we anticipate the future in ways that exacerbate painful experiences, often way way beyond the experience itself. It sounds weird to say, but bodily harm and poverty and "adverse weather" are not that bad when your mind isn't trying to prevent poor futures.
I appreciate the concept of "herbivores live in fear their entire life." This is exactly the kind of wildly different experience that we should imagine! Drawing from humans, both good things and bad things seem to get flattened over time. So an herbivore "living in fear every second" is probably not actually in overdrive their entire life. They probably are either alert or relaxed for a good proportion of their life. I am being hypocritical applying human-extrapolated framing here.
Among humans the things we find meaning in, the things we find intolerable, and our very basic perceptions are very different among us. Not only are wild animals in a very different situation, living a very different lifestyle than us, but they have very different perceptions, bodies, and desires. Which to me indicates they would be even more wildly different in their experiences of happiness and meaning than we are between each other. Most of that I think comes out positive for the animals.
I am not nearly as eloquent as the OP, but I would be happy to give more explanation of my opinions if anyone is interested to explore this further.
Sidenote: I think the shape of the dialogue is an artifact how wild animal welfare proponents with extreme uncertainty sometimes say "I can't be certain," which doesn't really register. And those who do feel confident have something (urgent) to express, which is that they think insects have net negative lives. There seems to be vague agreement that predators probably have net positive lives, but herbivores, insects, and r-selected species have net negative lives. This seems incorrect to me, or at least counterintuitive.
Thank you for the kind words. I feel you brought some very important arguments to the discussion as well.
Are you talking about the few people in the EA community working on this issue, or also people outside the community? I have never actually encountered anyone holding this view in person, despite attending various animal advocacy conferences. In fact everyone I've told about this concept seems genuinely appalled by it.
That might be a cultural thing. I'm from Austria, and the concept of lives not worth living was one of the justifications Nazis used to kill human beings.
Among EAs that are focused on preventing suffering in the non-human world, United States based.
This is not what most conservation scientists and "animal lovers" tend to espouse. Those groups also have severe biases in what they pay attention to.
Net negative lives is a bit of a weird concept to grapple with, but I wouldn't dismiss it immediately (despite how it sounds at first encounter). They've definitely thought about it. The problem with net positive lives is that you then might want to fill the world with slight net positive lives and get to a Malthusian state. Its not simple to reason about what a net positive/neutral/negative life is, nor how good/bad it is that lives that never come to be, nor how the world should be shaped in response to these things.
I roughly have the same opinion on this matter as you. I like how well you articulated it.
I'm not sure if we're right, but I think the conclusion about net negative lives could be rushed, unsubstantiated and dangerous.
And even if some lives are net negative, so what? IMO we should think more carefully whether "slightly net negative = not worth living".
Some people might have slightly net negative lives, but they never think about suicide or euthanasia.
From what I know about how we humans deal with it, euthanasia is usually used to prevent unbearable suffering with no hope of cure, not to save someone from slightly net negative life.
Thank you for your kind words. I couldn't agree more with your reasoning.
I appreciate you pushing back on the idea that insects live net-negative lives. However, when I opened my door to leave my apartment today, I crushed the legs of a bug that I didn't know was by the hinge of the door. I saw it limping it away on the door. I didn't kill it, but not sure that was the right decision.
I think these types of injuries are a stronger argument for wild animals living net-negative lives than violent deaths. (Though I am uncertain on the manner.)
Edit: A candidate for a net-positive insect life: "Because juvenile cicadas (known as “nymphs”) live underground, Yanega says that they “are probably almost never eaten by predators.” This is a potential indicator that periodical cicadas could have better welfare expectancy than many other insect species. Periodical cicadas spend 99.5% of their unusually long lives underground, enjoying an abundance of food and a relative lack of predators. It’s likely that predation becomes a serious threat only in the final few weeks of their lives, when they emerge and become adults." Source: WAI
Some predators swallow whole, so the death takes longer. But the bigger issues are probably disease and starvation, which generally take a long time and are common. So I think the average percent time of suffering of insects is much longer than your example, and probably than humans.
Thank you for pointing this out. I deliberately chose a single animal for the thought experiment because I didn't want to argue that I know whether suffering makes up a large part of their lives, but rather that no one can know. That notwithstanding, apparently there are people out there who are contemplating killing billions of invertebrates for their own supposed benefit.