Why it's difficult to find cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions we could do now

Introduction

Most Wild Animal Welfare (WAW) researchers I talked to thought that we are unlikely to find WAW interventions that would be directly competitive with farmed animal welfare interventions in terms of direct short-term cost-effectiveness. After spending some months trying to find such interventions myself, I tentatively agree. In this text, I will try to explain why.

Experience from the project

I spent some months trying to find a WAW intervention that is:

• tractable (can in principle be funded >$100K/yr in the next two years even if we choose not to do so), 
• non-controversial (>40% support and <30% oppose in a US poll), and 
• directly cost-effective (10%+ as cost-effective in expectation as chicken welfare reforms). 

The first step in the process was listing all potential interventions. Even though many people contributed to it, I found this list to be underwhelming (unfortunately, I don’t think I can share the list without asking for permission from everyone who contributed to it). I feel that coming up with plausible interventions for farmed animals is much easier. And in fact, lists of farmed animal welfare ideas I've seen from Charity Entrepreneurship did seem much more promising. And I found it easy to think of more farmed animal charity ideas for Charity Entrepreneurship. But despite all my research, none of the WAW ideas seem promising enough to seriously consider. 

Also, ideas in the WAW list seemed much more complex to research and gain certainty on than most ideas for farmed animals would be. Consequently, the impacts of WAW interventions also in general seemed to be much more uncertain. This makes me less excited about WAW interventions because it increases the effects of the optimizer’s curse.^[1]

This could be because the farmed animal welfare movement is much more advanced at this point, and we already know what intermediate goals benefit farmed animals (e.g., reducing animal product consumption, and various welfare reforms). If we figure out what intermediate goals could be good for WAW (e.g., increasing the number of large herbivores), then it might be easier to find promising WAW interventions. In other words, WAW currently seems too neglected for us to have a huge impact right away.

The intervention that seemed to have the highest chance of being cost-effective enough in a demonstrable way was trying to reduce aquatic noise. While I think it’s promising compared to other WAW interventions I considered, there are many farmed animal interventions I would prioritize over reducing aquatic noise.

I still wouldn’t be very surprised if someone found multiple interventions that satisfy these criteria better, especially since I don’t have a background in ecology or something similar. Also, only a few people are working on finding WAW interventions and the space of all possible WAW interventions is large. 

Comparing farmed and wild animal welfare interventions of similar categories

Both WAW and farmed animal welfare interventions can be categorized as:

• Improving welfare during life
• Changing population sizes
• Reducing suffering during death

Below, I compare farmed and wild animal welfare interventions in each of these categories.

Improving welfare 

Farmed animal welfare interventions seem more promising because humans are in control of the entire lives of farmed animals. This makes it easier to improve their conditions and genetics, and easier to monitor the effects of changes we make. Also, WAW interventions often affect more species which complicates things a lot. Hence, researching WAW welfare improvements seem to be less tractable.

Welfare improvements that to me seem most promising for wild animals are about some sort of pollution that causes a lot of stress to wild animals. Note that if it affects the population sizes of different species, it can be very difficult to know if an intervention is overall good or bad.

Changing population sizes 

I believe that it can sometimes be easier to change the population sizes of small wild animals than to change the population sizes of farmed animals. The problem is that it’s more difficult to know whether the change is good or bad for animal welfare.

The lives of most farmed animals are clearly worse than non-existence. In contrast, it’s unclear whether wild animals’ lives are good or bad (see this talk). My best guess is that in the short term, it would be better for WAW to decrease the overall population of wild animals. However, this usually goes against other human interests (like environmental protection), while decreasing farmed animal populations generally goes along with these other human interests as it decreases our environmental footprint. This makes working on reducing wild animal numbers much more morally ambiguous and controversial or even politically infeasible.

Also, often when we decrease the population of one species, the population of some other species increases. This applies to both farmed and wild animal interventions and complicates any analysis of short-term effects a lot. I’d say that the effects on WAW of farmed animal welfare interventions are maybe a bit easier to predict but we still can’t predict the total effect on welfare with reasonable certainty. This has led me to analysis paralysis and I don’t know what to do about that.

Perhaps we could speculate that some r-selected species are worse off than some k-selected species. And perhaps if we grow one crop or tree instead of another, or fish different species of fishes, the ratio between the populations of these species would change. I simply didn’t have the expertise to try to find such an intervention, maybe someone else will. Perhaps a more promising idea is trying to eradicate some parasite that causes a lot of suffering (e.g., screwworm).

Reducing suffering during death 

Since humane slaughter interventions typically affect animals for a short time, my personal intuition is that they are less important. But it depends on how you weigh intense suffering during death versus more prolonged but less intense suffering.

Reducing farmed animal slaughters might be more tractable because

• Slaughter reforms for farmed animals and wild-caught fish should be cheaper per animal to implement and research because these animals die under human control. Although animal advocates are more likely to lobby the government to make changes rather than make changes themselves so it’s not easy to say which is more promising. 
• Different methods of wild animal slaughter may have complicated indirect effects that are difficult to account for. For example, chemical insecticides may have different effects on non-target species compared to insecticides that introduce predators, parasitoids, or pathogens to suppress insect populations. Unless we decide to ignore indirect effects to avoid analysis paralysis, this makes research more difficult. This may be less of a problem for liminal animals as city ecosystems are simpler. 

On the other hand, since most animals humans kill are wild, the ultimate possible scale of working on wild animals is much higher.

I didn’t look into humane insecticides much because the author of this report told me in 2020 that there isn’t enough research on causes of insect suffering and nontarget effects of interventions to recommend an action that a non-research charity could center itself on. I took their word for it. 

For wild or liminal animals, another option is to never let animals that we would kill come into existence, perhaps by cutting off the food supply or informing people how to prevent pest infestations. I looked a bit into preventing termite infestations and it seemed doable but not a priority, partly because they might be living good lives most of the time.

Closing thoughts

I only give limited weight to this sort of high-level reasoning I did above, there could be interventions to which my reasoning does not apply. Also, it’s not that surprising that I failed to find promising WAW interventions since I don’t have expertise in ecology or other relevant fields. But few other researchers who have been researching this for a while failed to find very promising interventions too, so far and think that it’s unlikely that they will find them.

Also, I remember GiveWell writing a long time ago that when they look deeper at some cause area, they almost always conclude that it’s less promising than they originally thought, so maybe this is what happened to me. That said, when I looked into farmed animal welfare (especially welfare reforms), I came away thinking that it’s much more promising than I thought.

Opinions expressed here are solely my own. I’m not currently employed by any organization. I wrote this text about a year ago but didn’t get around to publishing it until now, something might have changed since then.

1. ^{^}

   Explanation of the Optimizer's Curse (adapted from this post): Suppose you weigh ten identical items with very inaccurate scales. The item that is the heaviest according to your results is simply the item whose weight was the most overestimated by the scales. Now suppose the items are similar but not identical. The item that is the heaviest according to the scales is also the item whose weight is most likely an overestimate.

   
   Similarly, suppose that you make very approximate cost-effectiveness estimates of ten different interventions. The charity that seems the most cost-effective according to your estimates could seem that way only because you overestimated its cost-effectiveness, not because it is actually more cost-effective than others. Consequently, even if we are unbiased in our estimates, we might be too optimistic about interventions that seem the most cost-effective. The more uncertain cost-effectiveness estimates are, the stronger the effect of the optimizer's curse is. Hence we should prefer interventions whose cost-effectiveness estimates are more robust. Since cost-effectiveness estimates of WAW interventions tend to be very uncertain, this is an argument against WAW interventions. More on optimizer’s curse can be read in Karnofsky (2016).