Cross-posted to my website.
Like the last time I wrote something like this, my suggestions here could apply to any large foundation. But most large foundations don’t care at all about what I say, and the Open Philanthropy Project cares at least a tiny bit about what I say, so I’m going to focus on Open Phil.
The Open Philanthropy Project ought to prioritize wild animal suffering (WAS). Here’s why:
- WAS is important and neglected.
- WAS is not tractable for most actors, but it’s tractable for Open Phil.
(Previously I discussed some of my issues with the importance/neglectedness/tractability framework, but I believe it works reasonably well for our purposes here.)
Why wild animal suffering matters
The problem of wild animal suffering has enormous scale. There exist far more sentient wild animals than there do humans or factory-farmed animals. Wild animal suffering dwarfs all other problems that currently exist. Some other problems (such as existential risk) may matter more, but WAS is certainly the biggest problem that’s happening right now.
Additionally, wild animal suffering is neglected: hardly anyone cares about this problem, and of the people who care, hardly any of them are trying to do anything about it. Animal Ethics is the only organization spending non-trivial time on the problem of wild animal suffering, and it’s a small organization with limited staff time and narrow focus–I see room for much, much more work on reducing suffering in the wild than what Animal Ethics does currently.
Why Open Phil should prioritize wild animal suffering
For people who care about animals, their biggest objection to reducing wild animal suffering is that it’s intractable. But this is mistaken: we can do lots of things right now to work toward reducing wild animal suffering. (If you doubt that we can do anything about wild animal suffering, please, please read my essay on this subject, and if you disagree, leave a comment explaining why.)
Even given the sad state of WAS research, we already have some concrete proposals for how to reduce wild animal suffering without risking big negative side effects. For example, Brian Tomasik has suggested paying farmers to use humane insecticides. Calculations suggest that this could prevent 250,000 painful deaths per dollar. This intervention alone looks much more cost-effective than GiveDirectly even if we heavily discount insects’ capacity for suffering. And this is just an initial idea; surely there exist much more effective interventions than this, and we could find them if we spent more time looking.
Reducing suffering in the wild is probably much more tractable than most people tend to think. That said, if you want to work on wild animal suffering, you either need specific relevant skills (which are rare and hard to develop) or you need to fund an organization doing relevant work; and right now Animal Ethics is the only such organization. We have something of a coordination problem here where people won’t work on wild animal suffering because they can’t get funding, and people don’t want to fund it because so few people are working on it.
What we need is a large, committed source of funding to jump-start the cause. If the Open Philanthropy Project began funding work on wild animal suffering, it could stimulate new research efforts or small-scale interventions by offering grants. Specifically, Open Phil should probably create a new focus area for wild animal suffering and possibly hire dedicated staff. This problem has such large scale, and so many possible interventions, that it absolutely deserves to be a dedicated focus area. Open Phil might consider lumping WAS under its farm animal welfare program, but this would excessively constrain its budget and limit the amount of staff time that it could receive. Wild animal suffering is a massive problem, and easily deserves as much attention as most of Open Phil’s other focus areas.
Did you see the presentation Lewis Bollard gave at the Sentience Conference? He mentions that wild animal suffering, insect suffering, and many other exciting cause areas are totally on the table at Open Phil (though under the auspices of the farm animal welfare department).
The Sentience Politics of the EA Foundation is also launching a research program on WAS led by Brian, so EAF is another great donation target for pushing WAS activism in addition to Animal Ethics.
The main reason why I think research on WAS is very tractable is the one described in The Attribution Moloch. We tend to think of research as the necessary drudgery that may uncover a highly effective intervention and whose value is measured by the effectiveness of that potential intervention times the probability of discovering it.
But J-PAL, for example, had to conduct a whole phalanx of experiments at all levels of scale and formality until they discovered that deworming was a great way of boosting school attendance. Each of those experiments that showed an intervention to have limited impact was not a failure but was highly valuable in that it informed the future research that led to the discovery of the effect of deworming.
Therefore I assign the same value to any research on WAS that produces results activists can update on that I would eventually assign to the implementation of the highly effective interventions that’ll be discovered. (If they are discovered – but WAS is sufficiently vast and neglected that I’m optimistic here.)