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.

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.

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).

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.

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.]

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.

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.

You make a great point about the parallel to the meat-eater problem, and I agree that, for similar reasons, it's probably still a good idea to advocate for chicken welfare reforms.

However, I don't think reductio ad absurdum is a compelling argument in this case.

This post's argument seems absurd not because it leads to some kind of internal contradiction, but rather because it argues for something that's way outside the things people normally think are good ideas. I don't think "seems absurd to most people" is a reliable indicator of "is not ethically sound," 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 it's 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 don't think that means we shouldn't 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 don't know exactly what global-scale arthropod welfare programs would look like, but I think we're 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 can't rule out the possibility that my position is driven by motivated reasoning. But I think it's a good sign that my claim ("Chicken welfare reforms might be good overall, even if they hurt arthropods in the short term") uses a similar logic to yours ("Chicken welfare reforms might be bad overall, even if they help chickens directly"). 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 it's 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 doesn't 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 hasn't 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) weren't working on farmed vertebrates.