Wild-Animal Suffering Movement Building Through Research
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Persis Eskander (Research Associate, Wild-Animal Suffering Research), EA Global X Berlin 2017, Oct 14/15 2017
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Wild-Animal Suffering Movement Building Through Research
- 2. Introduction • Assumptions • Quick introduction to the problem of wild-animal suffering. • Why we need to build a movement and how this can help us reduce wild-animal suffering. • Three research proposals: • Wildlife management strategies; • The impact of human activities on WAS; and • Wild animal experiences.
- 3. Assumptions • That nonhuman animals are morally relevant • That most animals are sentient and can suffer. • That although we can’t conclusively determine whether invertebrates can feel pain, we should apply the precautionary principle to minimize the harm we could be causing to them. • That although the tractability of wild-animal suffering is uncertain the scale and neglectedness of the problem warrant further exploration • That if we identify feasible interventions we should act.
- 4. What is the problem of wild- animal suffering? We tend to think nature is synonymous with good
- 5. What is the problem of wild- animal suffering? This is far from true. "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.” - Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden
- 6. What is the problem of wild-animal suffering? Argument from life history • Energy budgets are finite and organisms have to make trade-offs • K selection is a reproductive strategy that represents this trade-off where females produce many more offspring than will survive to adulthood. • Most of these offspring die at very early stages in their lives.
- 7. The scale and neglectedness of wild-animal suffering Ratio Scale of wild animal populations Humans Factory farmed animals Wild vertebrates Bugs
- 8. The tractability of wild-animal suffering Why is wild-animal suffering so neglected? • Because there are no clear solutions. • Intervening in nature is too impractical because it requires too much work, we have too little knowledge and it is too costly. • Complex ecosystems mean interventions could have unexpected or unintended negative effects. • However, if anything, these objections suggest that the tractability of wild-animal suffering is uncertain.
- 9. Why build a movement? No clear solutions to WAS People focus on other causes WAS remains neglected
- 10. What we don’t know about wild-animal suffering Why build a movement? What we’ve learnt
- 11. Why build a movement? “Currently, one important thing we can do is promote concern for wild animals in the hope that future generations—who are likely to have much more wealth, technology, and knowledge—will act rationally and humanely to reduce suffering in nature.” - Animal Charity Evaluators, Wild Animal Suffering Research “I think the best first step toward reducing wild-animal suffering that we can take now is to promote general concern for the issue. Causing more people to think and care about wild-animal suffering will hasten developments in research on wild-animal welfare and associated humane technologies...” - Brian Tomasik, The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
- 12. Why build a movement? Problem. People still feel averse to investing time in wild-animal suffering if they don’t have a clear idea how we can gain traction. Solution. Research avenues that demonstrate how their findings will help us identify clear solutions.
- 13. Wildlife Management Strategies What are they? • We currently interfere in the lives of wild animals by managing their habitats and populations when they interfere with the needs of humans. • These strategies can also have positive effects for wild animals. • This research area looks at key intervention areas such as: supplemental feeding, wildlife contraception, disease control, and predator control. • And asks the following questions: • what are the benefits? • what are the costs? • what is the sign of the intervention? and • what still needs to be explored?
- 14. Wildlife Management Strategies Vaccinating foxes in Europe • Foxes carrying and transmitting rabies in Europe were a serious concern in the 20th century. • Initial strategies focused on culling, poisoning and trapping • These strategies failed. • ORV programs were implemented across Europe over a period of 30 years and has led to the elimination of wildlife rabies in Europe.
- 15. Wildlife Management Strategies Why focus on this? • It’s true that ecosystems are very complex. • However, we often forget that we already intervene in ecosystems and have done so without seeing any unintended consequences. • There is a wealth of information about wildlife management studies and trials that we can collect and analyse. • If we do identify opportunities to improve wild-animal welfare we’re one step closer to finding clear solutions.
- 16. The Impact of Human Activities What are they? • We indirectly affect the lives of wild animals in many ways. • When converting natural vegetation into agricultural and urban land we change, destroy or reduce the habitats of wild animals. • There are ripple effects on the lives of wild animals as a result. • This research area collates data on how, where and to what extent human activities affect wild animals and asks • What are the implications for wild-animal suffering?
- 17. The Impact of Human Activities Population control through disease • The European rabbit is an introduced species in Australia. • Rabbits can cause plant-species extinction and topsoil erosion. • To keep populations low, rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) is systematically released to cultivate an outbreak. • The disease causes organ dysfunction and haemorrhaging, eventually leading to death from liver failure • When it was first released in 1995 it killed 10 million rabbits in 8 weeks.
- 18. The Impact of Human Activities Why focus on this? • Humans already have a significant impact on the environment. • By establishing a link between wild-animal suffering and human actions, we take steps towards strengthening the obligation to act. • When we understand how our activities affect the lives of wild animals, we can identify cost-effective changes to improve wild-animal welfare. • If we do identify opportunities to improve wild-animal welfare we’re one step closer to finding clear solutions.
- 19. Wild Animal Experiences What are they? • We need to assess existing wild animal suffering by examining and quantifying the amount and severity of their negative experiences. • This research area looks at how common and how bad negative experiences are for animals. For example: starvation, dehydration, parasitism, disease, injury, stress etc. • It also considers the experiences and behaviours of the most common animals, and those that have the shortest lifespans.
- 20. Wild Animal Experiences Causes of mortality in North American mammals A meta-analysis of the causes of mortality in North American mammals found • Anthropogenic causes represented the largest percentage (51.8%), of known mortality followed by natural causes (48.5%). • Natural causes were primarily predation (35.2%). • Omnivores and carnivores were more susceptible to anthropogenic death than herbivores • Predation accounts for most mortalities in small mammals. (Collins & Kays, 2011)
- 21. Wild Animal Experiences Why focus on this? • This is the largest and most complex research area and much of this research is beyond the scope of our small team. • As we build a detailed understanding of the lives and experiences of wild animals we come closer to a clearer idea of whether wild animals truly have net negative lives. • The more we know about which wild animal experiences are worst, the better we are able to prioritise cost-effective interventions to improve wild- animal welfare.
- 22. Conclusion Wild animals suffer and die every day on an unparalleled scale. We can’t sit on our hands and wait for cost-effective solutions to fall into our laps. We need to search hard for them, and we need to do it now.
- 23. Information If you want to learn more, support our work, or just get in touch. Website: was-research.org Email: info@was-research.org Or come up and say hey!
Notas del editor
- Thanks for the introduction. It’s great to see so many people interested in learning more about wild-animal suffering. As Michele mentioned, I work with the Wild-Animal Suffering Research project and today I’ll be talking to you about how we’re building a movement through research. This presentation presumes a basic understanding of wild-animal suffering, but I will begin by highlighting some assumptions I’ve made and run through a quick 5 minute introduction into the problem just to make sure we’re on the same page. Then we’re jumping straight into why we need to build a movement and how this can help us reduce wild-animal suffering. Lastly, I’ll discuss three research avenues. These are: Wildlife management strategies, The impact of human activities on WAS, and Wild animals experiences And look at how they contribute to building the movement to reduce the suffering of wild animals.
- Because I only have 20 or so minutes, I wanted to clarify some assumptions I’m making. 1. That nonhuman animals are morally relevant and their suffering (regardless of how it is caused) is morally important. 2. That most animals are sentient and have negative experiences that can cause them to suffer. 3. That although we can’t conclusively determine whether invertebrates such as insects, spiders, worms and snails can feel pain, we should apply the precautionary principle and minimize the harm we could be causing to them. 4. That although tractability of wild-animal suffering is uncertain, the scale and neglectedness of the problem warrant further exploration 5. That if we identify feasible interventions in nature to reduce wild-animal suffering we should act.
- We tend to believe that nature is synonymous with good and that the lives of animals in the wild are idyllic. That is, when untouched by humans, animals live wonderful, happy, peaceful lives.
- This is far from true. Many wild animals experience extreme suffering. It is common for animals to be hunted, attacked, and even eaten alive by predators. Intense competition for resources means that starvation is the norm for many animals. Parasites eat away at their hosts, injuries receive no treatment, wounds fester, and it is likely that only a very small minority of animals come close to living an enjoyable life. This is a male giraffe who broke his neck in a fight with another male. He lives in the Serengeti National Park. When this photo was taken he had lived with this injury, entirely untreated, for 5 years. When we talk about wild-animal suffering, the now famous quote by Richard Dawkins from River out of Eden sums it up well: "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”
- In addition to these instances of suffering, we should also consider that the most numerous wild animals in the world have extremely short life-spans. Life history theory suggests that all the energy budgets of an organism are finite, so trade-offs are inevitable. K selection is a reproductive strategy that represents this trade-off where females produce many more offspring than will survive to adulthood. Most of the offspring die at very early stages in their lives and since, as we’ve seen, death in the wild is usually prolonged and painful they are unlikely to have had enough positive experiences to outweigh the very negative experience of death. This means animals that have extremely short life-spans are likely to live net negative lives.
- We don’t know the exact number of wild animals, but we have some estimates. For every human on earth, there are at least 10 animals suffering in farms, and likely 1,000 to 100,000 wild vertebrates and plausibly 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 “bugs” (including creatures such as insects, spiders and earthworms). The scale of wild animal suffering is potentially enormous. Despite this, very few people are concerned. Traditional animal advocacy focuses almost exclusively on human-caused animal suffering and the welfare of wild animals is understudied in biology and ecology. This means in addition to being a problem of enormous scale it’s also extremely neglected.
- Why is wild-animal suffering so neglected? For many, the fact that there are no clear solutions means we shouldn’t invest time into working on the problem A common objection to the idea of intervening in nature is that it is impractical because it requires too much work, we have too little knowledge and it is too costly. Another related objection is that since we don’t fully understand the complexity and fragility of ecosystems, interventions could have unexpected or unintended negative effects. However, rather than suggest that wild-animal suffering has low tractability, these objections actually suggest that the tractability is uncertain. We don’t yet know enough about the problem nor what possible solutions might look like to know if wild-animal suffering is tractable.
- So if we know that wild-animal suffering is severe, it occurs on an enormous scale, and it’s neglected but we don’t know how to solve the problem. What now? Well the cause area seems to be trapped in a vicious cycle where the absence of clear solutions for WAS leads people to focus on other causes which means WAS remains neglected and no one works on finding solutions to WAS. Instead of remaining stuck in this cycle we can figure out we don’t know and what we need to know to determine the tractability of wild-animal suffering. Then we’ll be able to assess if there are cost-effective solutions.
- Unfortunately, what we don’t know is a lot. And if we stand any chance at finding cost-effective solutions we need support. We need more people working on answers to the questions that will lead us closer to assessing tractability. How do we do that? We build a movement. This isn’t a new idea. When EA’s talk about what we can do now, most focus on this sort of outreach.
- For example, ACE writes: “Currently, one important thing we can do is promote concern for wild animals in the hope that future generations—who are likely to have much more wealth, technology, and knowledge—will act rationally and humanely to reduce suffering in nature.” Brian Tomasik (who has written one of the most influential pieces on wild-animal suffering) also writes: “I think the best first step toward reducing wild-animal suffering that we can take now is to promote general concern for the issue. Causing more people to think and care about wild-animal suffering will hasten developments in research on wild-animal welfare and associated humane technologies...”
- However, unfortunately, presenting someone with the problem of wild-animal suffering isn’t enough to build a movement. People are still averse to investing time if they don’t have a clear idea how we can gain traction. Okay, so what do we do now? Well if people are hesitant about supporting or working on wild-animal suffering because it’s so uncertain, we can offer research avenues that demonstrate how their findings will help us identify clear solutions. Essentially what we want to do is lay the groundwork for smart, skilled researchers with domain expertise to be motivated enough to help us. Let’s have a look at three of these research avenues.
- We currently interfere in the lives of wild animals by managing their habitats and populations when they interfere with the needs of humans. This includes practices like wildlife conservation. Although these strategies have historically been developed to improve conditions for humans, they can also have positive effects for wild animals. I have to credit Ozy Brennan, a fellow WAS researcher, for developing this idea. The goal of this research is to summarize the evidence in some key intervention areas such as: supplemental feeding, wildlife contraception, disease control, and predator control. And asks the following questions: what are the benefits? what are the costs? what is the sign of the intervention? and what still needs to be explored? To get a clearer idea what we mean, let’s look at an example
- Foxes carrying and transmitting rabies in Europe were a serious concern in the 20th century. Initially, wildlife management strategies focused on culling, poisoning and trapping to reduce the population to small enough numbers which would contain the epidemic. These strategies failed. In fact, one study notes that it was in fact counterproductive because it “disrupted the social and spatial organization of foxes, thereby increasing contact rates and disease incidence”. (Müller, Schröder, Wysocki, Mettenleiter, & Freuling, 2015) When the oral rabies vaccination ORV) was developed it offered an interesting opportunity to eliminate rabies from wildlife without having to worry about artificially reducing population levels. After some successful field trials in the late 70s and early 80s, ORV was adopted across Europe and incorporated into large-scale vaccination programs over a period of 30 years. Since then, it’s been credited with being key to the elimination of wildlife rabies in Europe. And, as far as case studies go, it’s also seen as one of the most promising examples of the effectiveness of wildlife vaccination.
- I mentioned earlier that one of the most common objections to intervening in nature is that ecosystems are very complex. This is true and it’s important to remain aware of this. However we also often forget that we already intervene in ecosystems and have done so without seeing any unintended consequences. There is a wealth of information about wildlife management studies and trials that we can collect and analyse. By focusing on the concrete action that we can take, we’re hoping to demonstrate that interventions can be managed responsibly and also identify cost-effective opportunities to improve wild-animal welfare. If we do identify opportunities to improve wild-animal welfare we’re one step closer to finding clear solutions to the problem.
- Aside from directly intervening in the lives of wild animals, we also indirectly affect their lives in many ways. We convert natural vegetation into agricultural and urban land and this changes, destroys and reduces the wildlife habitats. There are ripple effects on the lives of wild animals as a result. For example: Overabundant or invasive species face population control measures such as culling, trapping, baiting, or the systemic release of disease. Habitat loss may increase resource competition which leads to a greater incidence of starvation. Habitat loss also leaves wild animals at risk of predation, death from exposure, or natural disasters. Climate change affects biodiversity and wild animal populations, and it’s unclear what this means for wild animals. This research area collects data on how, where and to what extent human activities affect wild animals and asks What are the implications for wild-animal suffering? To get a clearer idea what we mean, let’s look at an example
- In the first example we looked at how humans managed to control and eliminate disease from wildlife. In this example we’re looking at the systemic release of disease to control population numbers. The European rabbit is an introduced species in Australia whose population grew rapidly across the country. The overabundance of rabbits causes damage to Australian ecology in the form of plant-species extinction and topsoil erosion. To keep populations low, rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) is released through injections and baits to cultivate an outbreak. The disease causes organ dysfunction and haemorrhaging, eventually leading to death from liver failure. In most cases, death usually takes 48 hours, but can take up to 114 hours if the rabbit is injected and 150 hours if baited. In fact, during outbreaks (5–10%) of rabbits may only contract a subclinical form of the disease which means it takes them 1 or 2 weeks to die from liver failure. When RHD was first released in 1995, within the first 8 weeks it killed 10 million rabbits.
- We know that humans have a significant impact on the environment. What’s unclear is whether this impact is net negative or positive for wild animals. This research serves a few purposes: By establishing a link between wild-animal suffering and human actions, we take steps towards strengthening the obligation to act. When we understand how our activities affect the lives of wild animals, we can identify cost-effective adjustments to improve wild-animal welfare. If we do identify opportunities to improve wild-animal welfare we’re one step closer to finding solutions.
- One of the biggest gaps in our knowledge at the moment is in understanding the experiences of wild animals. We can assess wild-animal suffering by examining and quantifying the amount and severity of their negative experiences. This research area, developed by Georgia Ray, looks at the commonness and severity of negative experiences like predation, starvation, dehydration, parasitism and disease. It also considers the experiences and behaviours of the most common animals, and those that have the shortest lifespans. Georgia notes that “the most common wild animals are small - nematodes and tiny zooplankton outnumber all other animals. In terms of more complex animals, insects outnumber vertebrates. Even in terms of vertebrates, small fish outnumber land animals. The experiences of these tiny and common animals bear much more consideration than they’ve been given so far.” Okay, let’s look at an example.
- In 2011, a meta-analysis was conducted on the causes of mortality in North American mammals. It looked at 69 mammal populations across 27 species and identified 1874 known causes of mortality. (Collins & Kays, 2011) The study found: Anthropogenic (human-caused deaths) represented the largest percentage (51.8%) followed closely by natural causes (48.5%). Anthropogenic causes can be divided into legal harvest (29.9%), poaching (5.4%), and vehicle collision (9.2%) Natural causes were primarily predation (35.2%), with lesser amounts of disease (3.8%) starvation (3.2%) and other (6.1%, including hypothermia, accidents such as falls, etc.). Interesting findings: Omnivores and carnivores were more susceptible to anthropogenic death than herbivores Predation accounts for most mortalities in small mammals, and indeed the smallest mammals (<1 kg) reviewed here died from predation almost exclusively
- This is the largest and most complex research area and much of this research is beyond the scope of our small team. However, with studies like the one I just discussed we can make some headway by drawing implications from available content. We can also identify where we have gaps in research. As we build a detailed understanding of the experiences of wild animals we come closer to a clearer idea of whether wild animals live net negative or positive lives. The more we know about which experiences are worst, the better we are able to prioritise cost-effective interventions to improve wild-animal welfare.
- These are just some promising areas of research. We’re still in very early days and there’s still much we need to uncover. It’s likely that as we put more resources into working on wild-animal suffering we’ll discover other avenues that are equally or even more promising. I want to end with a reminder of the enormity and severity of this problem. Wild animals suffer and die every day on an unparalleled scale. We can’t sit on our hands and wait for cost-effective solutions to fall into our laps. We need to search hard for them, and we need to do it now. Thank you.
- I want to acknowledge Ozy Brennan, Georgia Ray and Brian Tomasik whose brilliant ideas and work I’ve relied on heavily to put this presentation together. If you want to learn more, support our work or just get in touch, I’ve put up our details.