Building Support for Wild Animal Suffering

Persis: Today, the goal for this whiteboard session is to better understand what are some successful communication techniques or strategies that we could be applying depending on different target audiences that are relevant for wild animal suffering. So, it's going to be broken down into four categories. The first is basic messaging. The second is communicating wild animal suffering to domain experts. So, for example, people in academia. The third is communicating wild animal suffering to people who are interested in animal rights and animal welfare but who are not quite convinced that we should be focusing on this over more traditional issues. And the last one is on the best way to talk about interventions.

Persis: So I'm going to start with asking each of the panelists to give us an example of basic messaging that's been really successful and ways that they've been able to communicate with someone who's totally unfamiliar with wild animal suffering. And also, feel free to point out areas in which things haven't quite worked out as well. So, we might start with Ozy and then go down.

Ozy: Hi. So I think one of the things that is really important for me in communicating about wild animal suffering is that I very much try to be authentic and I try to say the things that I genuinely believe. I think that there's a real tendency for people to be like, “Oh no. We have to say things that are really calculated to appeal to everyone.” And I don't think that that's a good way to grow a movement. I think that both ethically we should be honest about what our true thoughts are and in terms of getting people who are really value-aligned... it might be helpful in the short term, but in the long run, you need the people that you're going to get by actually saying what you believe.

Ozy: Another thing that I found is helpful in basic messaging is thinking about the objections that people always have and sort of, don't wait for them to bring it up and being like, for example, I usually, when I'm talking to people about wild animal suffering, I mention... I bring up by myself that nobody is going to do anything, nobody is going to go out there and genetically engineer lions so that they only eat grass tomorrow, we're going to do lots of research before we do anything. We're going to start with smaller scale projects. There's a lot of uncertainty about ecology and we're totally aware of that and this is something that we're concerned about at Wild Animal Suffering Research and at other organizations.

Ozy: And another thing that I tend to bring up is that, what I like to say is that right now, a lot of wildlife management has a dual purpose. It is managed for human benefit in terms of things like recreation, going out to nature, and also in terms of things like flood control. And it's also managed for conservation purposes. And so, my ideal thing would be to have it so that wildlife management is done with an eye towards human benefit and conservation and the welfare of the animals themselves. And so, I think that that ends up helping because it's not like I'm opposing humans and wild animals or conservation and wild animals but being like, all of these things are important. Let's try to figure out a way to do wildlife management so that we can do all of them.

Kieran: Yeah. That was a very detailed and comprehensive answer. My answer is just quite basic. I usually say something along the lines of wild animals do matter and the conditions for wild animals don't seem great. I try and stay away from the more radical, fringe ideas of wild animals being crazily net negative, or the bulk of moral value is in insects. Yeah, this is basically my like, basic messaging approach.

Abraham: Yeah, similarly, I think I like to focus on the scope of suffering in nature but also, really talk about the experiences of individuals. So, compare sort of the survival strategy of say, humans who spend a lot of time nurturing their young all the way until they can basically take care of themselves, to that of other animals where a lot of their young are going to die at a young age, probably painfully. I definitely avoid talking about speculative strategies to reduce wild animal suffering unless it... someone's really pushing what we can do. And when that does happen, I think it's... so Utility Farm has done a couple studies on what kind of messaging is most effective for talking about that, and pretty much describing the exact same strategy or intervention using different verbs will make a pretty radical difference in people's receptivity to that. So, using, talking about addressing wild animal suffering by stewarding nature or participating in a natural ecosystem as opposed to intervening in the lives of animals in the wild, just people are a lot more willing, it seems like to listen to what you have to say when you use language that they're used to and comfortable with like that.

Persis: So, two takeaways that I've gotten from what the three of you have said is that, the first is trying to make it relatable and that means maybe, referring to issues that people are already in support of. And then, maybe drawing that further, taking the inferences further. And the second one is trying to find compromises between value systems. One question that I always feel people ask me whenever I talk about wild animal suffering to someone who's totally unfamiliar with it is, well, suffering in the wild is natural. I mean, that's pretty straightforward argument that a lot of people make. And so, we have this act omission bias. Do you have thoughts on ways that we can address that?

Kieran: Yeah so, one thing that I would usually go there is that within humans, there's also a lot of natural suffering, and people are fine with eradicating diseases for humans. When we apply this reasoning to humans, it just that doesn't seem to stand up. So, I would point that out and then say if we kind of, follow that reasoning for wild animals, it just doesn't seem to hold up for me.

Ozy: Yeah. I think that my point of view would be very much, well, malaria is natural. Like, 50% of all children dying before the age of five is natural. There's lots of horrible things that are natural. And I think that it is frankly speciesist to say we're going to try to get rid of natural things that are horrible for humans but if you're a wild animal, you're on your own, sorry.

Abraham: Yeah, I feel like a lot of people who express things like this have a bit of misanthropic view towards nature. We don't like the idea of humans coming in and sort of, messing with nature. And I like to kind of play off that, and push on that and ask them, “If what you see in nature is sort of the beauty and awe and grandeur, if that's what's valuable in natural systems, is that not sort of, ascribing human values onto nature?” And then, pushing on the question of well what's actually important about natural systems and I think a lot of people can come around to the idea that what really matters in nature is the lives of the beings who inhabit it.

Persis: Great, let's move on to one that I'm particularly interested in, communicating wild animal suffering to domain experts. So one disagreement that I think I've had with a lot of people who are really invested in working in wild animal welfare is the extent to which we might need domain experts to be value aligned. So how important is it to improve our understanding of wild animal suffering, for domain experts to care about wild animal welfare and be motivated by a desire to improve the wellbeing of wild animals, as opposed to just being capable of doing empirical research that we then find valuable? So I'll start with Abraham.

Abraham: Yeah, so I don't think domain experts are very aligned right now. In my experience a lot of people are really open to the idea that we should know more about the welfare of animals in the wild but they stop at the step of, we should do something to improve their welfare. And I think to some extent that's okay. I think there's definitely a lot of valuable research that can be done by biologists and ecologists just to learn more about the welfare of animals currently, but in the long run we're really going to need some kind of value alignment in order to, especially to just kind of assess how we can impact environments. So on the regulatory side there's already a huge treasure trove of data from the EPA and other similar agencies in other countries on how humans impact ecosystems when they build subdivisions, or do other sorts of projects like that. There's a very robust field and I think a lot of the work of translating that work into the language of welfare will require people who are really invested in doing these projects to improve the lives of wild animals.

Kieran: Yeah so I think one critical distinction here is pioneers within the field versus those who then join the field after the field has been started. I think that for the pioneers who are initially in this field, that is probably going to be more tractable that they are value aligned. I think another critical distinction here is whether the research is on these nitty gritty empirical questions or whether the research is on prioritizing different questions. If it is on prioritizing different questions, I would say they very much need to be value aligned. If it is for things like nitty gritty questions, I think that they don't really need to be value aligned, I think they just need to have good research skills and research skills can be kind of orthogonal to this value alignment.

Ozy: I think personally having researchers that care about wild animal suffering is very important. It's true there is a lot of information out there that's valuable for wild animal suffering that we collect for all sort of reasons. There's information about chronic stress in animals that people do because they're studying human depression and comparing it to wild animals. There's research about animals in zoos, there's research about epidemiology, there's tons of research about wildlife diseases that's intended to protect farmed animals. But the fact of the matter is that you're not going to get research on the most important issues of wild animal suffering if they're primarily being done either for human value or the value of domestic animals or because of scientific interest.

Another thing that I think is really important for domain experts, I don't think was talked about before is that domain experts have a lot of credibility with governments and I think that if we're going to have long-term change for wild animals, a lot of that is going to be done through governments because governments end up setting the policies about wildlife refuges and other places where lots of wildlife live.

Persis: I have a follow up question. To what extent do you think it might be useful to work with academics who maybe aren't value aligned in the beginning and then see how far along the process you can move them? Or do you think perhaps values spreading within academia is a less effective route than starting directly with value aligned academics and having them grow the movement for us?

Abraham: I don't think they're mutually exclusive, I think we should be doing both. The people who are published already, who bring legitimacy are going to be academics, so having them do some of the outreach within academia is very important. But I also think we can just by building broader public awareness of these issues, we can make them seem more normalized and make people more comfortable researching them in general, so both are important.

Kieran: Yeah I think it's a really good question. I don't have strong views on it. One thing I would say is just pick up on what Abraham just said but I think it is important to have academics promoting these ideas to other academics. I think it's a lot harder to do the value spreading from kind of the non-profit sector into academia, it would be a lot better for an academic, for an ecologist or a biologist, whoever it is to take this on and to promote it to their peers.

Ozy: Yeah, I feel like I don't really have a good sense right of what are the best ways to do spreading of anti animal suffering values to academia are. I think we should try a bunch of different things and see what works.

Persis: So, I'd be interested in your experiences in how receptive domain experts have been and it would be great if you could give an example of a conversation that you've had, maybe one that was either... where the academic was very receptive or one where they were very unreceptive. And where you think the conversation went well or poorly.

Abraham: Yeah I think I've a lot of incredibly productive conversations about the need for knowing more about the welfare of animals in the wild with academics. But I can think of multiple particular cases where that conversation has gone really well and the person has looked into kind of the historical background of our movement and gotten very wary of being associated with the movement, and I think that's a major issue. For people to kind of... the first content that they see when they Google "wild animal suffering" to be maybe not super accessible or be focused on very obscure issues or controversial issues. And so I can think multiple particular examples where people have kind of come back to me after I've had a very productive conversation with them and expressed some hesitance to continue working on this.

I think the other thing is, I've heard a lot of people say that they're interested in it, but a lack of funding is going to stop them from pursuing research in it. And so I think there's probably a lot of opportunity to reach out to... I mean there's individual decision makers in large scientific foundations that are doing funding, who good outreach to might be able to make a significant difference, because there's people who think this is important who just think they can't get the funding they would need right now to do research that they'd like to do. So I think there's potential there as well.

Kieran: So I have fairly limited experience with this. So I feel like I do not have a great sense of it. I think that one thing to bear in mind with this question is that the academic field is split along different kind of disciplines so we have philosophy, biology, ecology, psychology. It's going to be different for different disciplines. I think that we'll need different approaches for different disciplines. I think it's also an empirical question and I think that something that could be useful here is having a survey of biologists or a survey of ecologists and seeing what their baseline views are. I think that something else that is important to communicate is that there is funders that are interested in this, so that you can be funded for this. The other thing I would say is that there's existing literature on this, and the other thing that I would say is that potentially some of the early publications in this field could be very prestigious because later on they would receive many citations.

Ozy: One of the things I've noticed that is interesting to me is that there's a very positive response to wild animal suffering stuff from philosophers. There are several philosophers I can think of who are working on it fairly intensively. There's a surprisingly positive response from economists for some reason, but the natural sciences tend to be much lower uptake I've noticed, I'm not sure why that is. I am puzzled about the number of economists that are interested in wild animal suffering.

And another thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people, academics I think in the natural sciences who care about wild animals, and believe that we should help wild animals, and think that the best thing that we can do for wild animals is to leave them alone. And I think that this is a fairly common position, and so I think... I'm not sure to what extent it's right and I think that that's something that we're going to have to engage with as a movement is the position of "yes wild animals matter but we're not going to be able to improve their lives anymore than just by not polluting and not feeding them and so on and so forth."

Persis: So two hurdles that have already come up are funding constraints and perhaps being too controversial too early on. I can think of another hurdle in terms of value differences which I think Ozy also mentioned. I'd be interested in your views on what other major hurdles there might be for academics getting involved, and so it would be interesting to see if there's a distinction between your experience talking to people in philosophy or people in economics or people in biology. And what some possible solutions might be. So if someone, if an academic tells you they're funding constrained, what is a way around that other than the obvious of giving their university funding, but how can we better support them?

Kieran: Yeah so that's a really good question. One thing... so one approach that could be helpful here is having wild animal suffering as part of their research, not as the focus of their research, so incorporating that into their existing research, that could be useful in terms of them getting funding for that. I think that another thing that could be useful is focusing on academics who already have the tenure so they have the freedom to focus on these issues if they wish rather than focusing on these up and coming academics who are very much constrained in what they can publish on.

Ozy: One project I think is very interesting is the effective thesis project, which is a project that lists a bunch of thesis ideas that effective altruists are interested in that are in a variety of different fields, with the idea that people who are doing a masters thesis or a PhD thesis or maybe even an undergraduate thesis would be able to look at them and then do work on these EA topics. I believe that a substantial number of the ideas in the effective thesis projects are wild animal suffering oriented right now.

Abraham: Yeah I think there's a lot of potential in different kinds of advocacy within academia that aren't necessarily getting published research, especially editorial advocacy in journals. I think there's room for bibliographies on stuff that's already been published that is legitimate and there's room for just people arguing that there's more of a need for this field, and that usually doesn't have to be well funded research, that's something many academics are able to do with the resources they already have, and I think working with academics to get those published in legitimate science journals is definitely a way to help just create buzz about the field and get it established.

Persis: That's great, let's move on now to communicating with animal rights or welfare advocates. When talking about wild animal suffering with advocates who are skeptical, what do you think is... well, how would you weigh a focus on social change versus a focus on pragmatic interventions, and I guess this question in part requires an understanding of, why might an advocate be skeptical? And so it might be interesting to first mention some of the skepticism that advocates have raised and then how you best think you can address it. Maybe we can start with Ozy?

Ozy: Actually in my experience, a lot of the animal rights people I've talked to have been really receptive about wild animal suffering stuff, and in my experience the big objections that people have had is okay, but can we do something about this that is going to be a better way to help animals than dealing with farmed animal stuff?

That has been the biggest objection that I've had is people being like, we are totally concerned about suffering in nature but it's complicated. It's hard. There might be knock-on negative effects and we definitely know that trying to get rid of factory farming is going to positive.

Kieran: So I think the biggest objection that I come across is that just now is not really the time for this. Now is more of a time for farmed animals. We should focus on farmed animals. Once we have the farmed animals situation under control, then we can move onto wild animals and I think I'm fairly sympathetic to that. What I would say is that I do lean more in a social change direction than the pragmatic intervention direction, and I think a large part of that is because I'm just not sure there really is any pragmatic interventions right now. So if we did have further research on this and we did identify some of those, I would certainly be open to updating on that, but until we do identify those, I think we should be leaning in impact social change direction.

Abraham: Yeah. I don't know if I agree about there not being viable interventions right now but I definitely agree that social change is the way to go with many animal advocates. I think part of the reason is one of the best ways to sort of ensure that we might do something about wild animal suffering in the future is just, instilling broader values of compassion for animals in people and I think the group of people who does that really well is often the farmed animal advocacy movement. So if wild animals are part of the conversation as well, that seems really beneficial to the movement in the long run.

I also think that, yeah, definitely a lot of animal advocates are skeptical of some of the proposed interventions and maybe it's not the best idea to talk about those, but they're people who are just super compassionate and have a lot of empathy for animals often, and pointing to the suffering that is in nature, often they understand and see that that's a huge issue and aren't going to forget about that, so I think it's definitely worthwhile to do that kind of outreach.

Persis: One follow-up question that came out of Kieran's response, so if we don't think that there are pragmatic interventions or viable interventions at the moment and instead we focus predominately on social change, does that hinder our ability to do research to then later on discover pragmatic interventions or do you think that they're not really mutually exclusive and you can both encourage social change whilst also doing the research on the side?

Kieran: Yeah. I don't see them as mutually exclusive. I would say that it seems like a totally viable approach to do both. One thing I would say I think it would be helpful to have interventions that we could point out as possible examples because otherwise, people will kind of see this issue as too intractable, but if we do have these interventions they can serve a role as a psychological hook almost. So I think, yeah, it would be really helpful to have these, like, go-to interventions and I would still probably focus on the social change aspect.

Ozy: I think that, I mean... I don't know that right now there are interventions that are viable interventions in the sense of, you should donate to this intervention instead of buy malaria nets for a people in the developing world, but I suspect that there are, with our current level of knowledge, interventions that we can be fairly certain are net positive: people, keep your cats inside and clean your bird feeders.

I think that being able to have these sorts of concrete interventions is really important for being able to do social change because I feel like if you just try to concentrate on getting people to care about wild animals then, you're like, okay people, care about wild animals. And then they're like okay, so what do we do now that we care about wild animals, and we're like oh, tell more people that you care about wild animals.

Ozy: And then, it just, I feel like that's really unsatisfying for a lot of people and they're like why should I care about wild animals if I'm not going to get to do anything with my caring. So I think that being able to point to well, these are some things that we're working on, that said, I'm not sure that anything that we have right now is going to beat farmed animals or global poverty charities in terms of cost effectiveness. I'm optimistic that some of them will in the future.

Abraham: I definitely agree that pointing to specific interventions, or specific calls to action, is really important but I also think the social change is a fundamental part of getting the pragmatic research done just because, I think a big barrier to people doing the research is the fact that it's not normalized to believe that we should do something about the suffering of wild animals and, you know, social change is the way that you normalize that, so if people Google wild animal suffering, there should be academics talking about it. There should be random people who like, have no background in this issue being like, yeah, wild animals are important and there's a lot of suffering. It should seem very normal to believe that we should do something about this. Yeah.

Ozy: I think that we should do more research is in fact a concrete call to action, like, especially if you're targeting academics which, going back to the academics topic but, you know, being like we should care about wild animals and because you care about wild animals, you should do research into the prevalence of chronic stress in nature or whatever, is like, very much a concrete intervention that we can... a concrete thing that we can ask people to do.

Persis: Yeah. So one thing I encounter when I have spoken to animal rights activists or advocates is when we come to talking about what viable interventions might be, I often come up against the intrinsic value of nature argument, and often it's very difficult to have this discussion with someone who maybe firstly, doesn't really recognize that they value nature intrinsically and secondly, because it's extremely difficult to try and shift values. I'd be interested in your experiences when you have encountered that and what are some smart ways that you've been able to address that?

Ozy: One thing I try to point out to people is that, like, regardless of whether or not a non-intervene in nature would be a good thing, we don't have that option. It's not on the table. In fact, we are heating up the entire globe. There's pollution in the air. There's, you know the Scottish Highlands? They're that way because of sheep. They used to be forests. There used to be mammoths in America and then humans drove them extinct.

It might be nice to go back to having forests in the Scottish Highlands and mammoths, but we don't really have that option. Every city we have is an intervention into nature. The question is whether we're going to intervene into nature responsibly and with stewardship for the animals that are there, or whether we're just going to be like yes, we're going to intervene in nature in ways that benefit us and forget the animals that are there.

Kieran: Yeah. I think I agree with all of that. What I would add is so one, it's an empirical question. We could do further research on this. We can survey people and see what messages they are most receptive to. The other point I would add is that yes, so we're already intervening in nature and, you know, in these ways that we're already intervening, are there better ways that we could be intervening? Kind of pointing these out. So perhaps something along the lines of, you know, wild-caught fish, if there's like more humane slaughter practices there.

Ozy: Another thing I would point out is that we can, even if you are like, all I want to do is stop humans from intervening in nature, you can prioritize which environmentalist things you do based on, in part, on their effects on wild animals. For example, something like anthropogenic noise could have a very negative effect on fish and it is possible that from a perspective that's concerned about wild animals suffering, you're like, I'm going to care more about anthropogenic noise and maybe less about things that don't also cause harm to wild animals.