Wild Animal Suffering Should be Effective Altruism's Flagship Cause
WAS is critical not only for animal life, but for ensuring human progress
intro
Wild animal suffering is the field focused on addressing the needs and well-being of wild animals, including problems that we have come to accept as natural, like competition or disease.
Our gut reaction to this suffering is to view it existentially: what comprises this “natural” suffering, and what is its significance? I propose that the better reaction is to view it as an engineering problem: if we take as a given that wild animals should suffer as little as possible, what system should we strive to implement?
The question is still intractable, but it points to a critical distinction: humans are not limited to solving human problems. The limit of engineering is not products or mega-projects; it is biomes, ecosystems, and planets. In this sense, addressing wild animal suffering requires us to set human horizons far wider than even the fiercest techno-optimist today.
We can currently design a hamster cage to make most of the hamsters inside (close to) maximally happy. Give them a complex environment with the opportunity to socialize, nest, forage, make their bed, and eat food1. We can roughly say the same about building a good zoo. We are nowhere near being able to engineer a suffering-free rainforest.
Revolutions in computer science and biology tend to lead to existential risk overshadowing animal rights issues, but a revolution in biological systems design and ecology may soon bring animal welfare into the foreground.
the microbiome: ecosystem design in vivo
20 years ago, one of the most interesting computer science problems you could be working on is the distribution of packages in fulfillment centers. Moving boxes quickly between shelves needed MIT engineers (jeff bezos recruiting @ MIT, timestamped at 16:49).
I would argue that the next problem like this, a seemingly boring problem invigorated by a systematic complexity, is solving the gut microbiome. By aiding digestion and synthesizing compounds in our small intestine, the microbiome affects a host of metabolic, neurological, and immune conditions.
Getting the average person a good picture of their microbiome will likely require a massive effort on the part of computer scientists, cell biologists, doctors, nutritionists, designers, and entrepreneurs. And that’s just to start measuring. The range of possible interventions, from the nutrients consumed to the time at which the intervention is made, is proving to be as vast and impactful as the range of possible interventions in larger-scale biomes.
Thus, the work of studying, predicting, and prescribing impactful bacterial interventions will not only lead to huge advancements in our ability to treat disease, but will serve as a key precursor to terrestrial-scale ecosystem design.
ecosystem design on mars
When humans first arrive on mars, we will build relatively primitive farms in order to sustain small outposts. In time, mars will give us our first opportunity to preserve all of animal life in a human-designed ecosystem. This is a critical juncture in sowing consciousness throughout the universe, and any ethical choices made (or shunned) at this point will have consequences that last centuries, or even beyond the existence of humanity itself.
Likewise, we may come to the point where we have agreed on how the new “nature” we design should minimize suffering, but still haven’t solved the logistical problems necessary to make such a biome work.
Our place at the frontier of multiplanetary existence thus requires a serious look at ecosystem design through the lens of wild animal suffering research. Otherwise, we may find ourselves building multiplanetary torture chambers, or, worse, laying the seeds of our own extinction.
to whom this should matter
My hope is that suffering-preventative biome design could be the first megaproject to grow under the EA lens, which is plausible given the energy/talent that the movement attracts, and that it will attract SpaceX types to altruism more generally in the short term.
Even separate from its altruistic potential, biome design could prove to be one of the hairiest and most interesting engineering problems in the world of atoms. Whether we are colonizing our stomachs or our solar system, these questions will be confronted in greater scope and detail as time goes on. The awareness and consideration of the animals in these biomes must scale accordingly.
It is easy to get wrapped up in the micro side of engineering, in problems solved by graphs and nodes or mechanics and thermodynamics. These problems can be both easily conceptualized and endlessly reframed, making them like beautiful puzzles. It is common to forget that when it comes to many messier macro-scale problems, we haven’t even started.
addendum: why should this be the flagship (and not “X”?)
This issue sits at a unique crossroads where it can be a plausible “gateway drug” to existential risk problems, social or animal welfare causes, and career-length focus areas. A problem such as global poverty, while arguably bigger and more pressing than animal welfare, is a worse flagship because of its narrower range of solutions. Considered alongside existential risk problems such as artificial intelligence or nuclear risk, wild animal suffering presents a distinctly optimistic and open starting point for those curious about the movement.
One plausible objection is that developing solutions for wild animal suffering is more nebulous than global poverty’s history of proven interventions. Wild animal suffering (or at least animal rights/ecology) has a history of related interventions that are at least as well known, such as the development of artificial meat and dairy and the introduction of population control programs in rural areas.
Another objection is just that this entire field could go nowhere, or that the amount of suffering that is being experienced may just be wildly overestimated. Even taken at face value, this proposed failure-state would introudce many to effective altruism and leave a relatively neutral mark on EA going forward. The moral history and foundations of the cause would still stand, making this objection analogous to saying the same about prohibition in the early 1900s.
This brings us to what is, in my mind at least, the most serious objection against wild animal suffering as a flagship. If a megaproject such as biome design is taken up under the effective altruist lens, the failure of such a project may bring down the status of the rest of the movement to a fringe of sci-fi protestants. The solution to this is simple: when the time comes, do not fail!