Should We Take the Natural Suffering of Wild Animals Seriously?
Is “I didn’t break it so I’m not going to touch it” a morally defensible position?
There is no inherent principle of the universe that dictates that conscious beings experience more pleasure than suffering. It is entirely possible that an animal’s life could contain far more suffering than pleasure. In fact, this could be true for an entire species. There’s no rule against this, no law of physics that prohibits it.
Is there such a species, whose life is mainly suffering? I don’t know, but if we really care about the suffering of conscious beings, shouldn’t we make it a priority to find out? We may investigate and conclude that the lives of all conscious beings, on average, contain more pleasure than suffering. That would be great; we would be all done here. But, it’s also possible that we don’t find that, that we find that some animals, on average, experience more suffering than pleasure.
If we commit to taking this seriously, then we have to allow for this result. And we have to think about what we would do in this case. What if we conclude that some wildlife spends more time suffering than enjoying life? Many people strive to make the world a better place - wouldn't minimizing this suffering do that? Given a goal of maximizing the pleasure of conscious beings and minimizing suffering, what should we do?
Seahorses have thousands of children (fun fact: it's the males that give birth; sex is determined by what you bring to the party - eggs or sperm - not whether you come away with the zygote). How good is their life? Baby sea horses are a tasty snack - they are preyed upon by crabs, rays, fish, penguins, other birds, humans, and more. I don't know how much suffering a baby seahorse is capable of, but I imagine the process of being eaten consists of at least some suffering. Do they get enough pleasure before that suffering takes place? If not, the fact that there are thousands makes their existence concerning.
I remember watching nature shows about sea turtle hatchlings and all the predation they experience before they even touch the water. They’re mostly defenseless from predators during their initial sprint across the sand into the ocean. It’s estimated that only 1 in 1000 baby sea turtles make it into adulthood. Do they experience more pleasure than suffering in those short lives? It seems unlikely to me that the ones eaten within seconds of their hatching do, but that seems to be a minority of hatchlings (this study found that only 7.6% of turtles didn’t live long enough to reach the ocean). Maybe most live long enough to enjoy themselves, but it's not obviously the case.
What does all of this mean for the question? It doesn’t mean that any species experiences more suffering than pleasure. But I think these examples strongly suggest that there’s a real possibility that some species - whether it’s one I mentioned here or not - could experience more suffering than pleasure.
I’ve highlighted r-selected species so far, in part because more members of these species die young, which seems more likely to have higher suffering than pleasure. But also, it’s because the implications are staggering. A single frog can lay 50,000 eggs. What if 49,998 experience net suffering and only 2 experience net pleasure? These ratios wildly tip the scale in terms of the animal experiencing more suffering overall.
We shouldn’t limit our thinking to prey species. What about animals that prey on cape buffalo? I would hate to have to be required to be near those horns every time I needed to satiate my hunger. Or animals that eat scorpions but aren’t immune to their venom? I could imagine their lives suck a lot.
Humans are capable of experiencing both great suffering and great pleasure. We know that both of these are valuable to us as a species because otherwise we wouldn’t have evolved that way. Evolving the ability to experience suffering seems straightforward - if we didn’t have an instinctual aversion to pain, we wouldn’t protest when predators ripped our bodies apart, which would prevent us from passing on our genes. But the evolution of experiencing pleasure seems less straightforward to me. If I dislike the experience of being hungry, why is it important that I enjoy the experience of eating so much? What if it was just the cessation of the negative experience of being hungry? Wouldn’t that be enough to get me to eat my veggies? But for one reason or another, people experience great amounts of pleasure. Maybe it’s to coerce us to engage in more high-risk, high-reward activities. If so, then I don’t think it’s necessarily true that all species would have the same forcing function. There are high-risk activities, such as chasing a herd of bison off a cliff, that a human could do that would allow their entire tribe to eat for weeks. But does such an activity exist for a gazelle? I can’t imagine what a big reward for a gazelle would even be. More grass? Much, much more grass? I don’t know. This is entirely speculation, but I don’t think we can assume that all species experience great pleasure at all, even if they can experience great suffering.
Yet another consideration: What if a particular species causes more suffering for other species. Maybe the existence of lions causes an enormous amount of suffering in the world? I know, it’s far, far, far more likely that it's humans that cause so much suffering, but this post is focused on natural suffering, which I’m defining as not associated with humans. The reason that I'm not focusing on humans is that, theoretically, if humans are causing net suffering to other species, we could get together and agree to change our ways. This isn’t going to happen with lions.
Another side note: Billions of animals live in horrid conditions due to human factory farming. I believe reducing the suffering of these animals is of great importance, but it's a separate question for a separate post. Improving conditions for those animals would not reduce the need to consider the suffering of wild animals.
The question of this post is if we should take this seriously. When I say "take it seriously", I mean that if we conclude that 99% of global suffering occurs in the wild, we're going to put 99% of our resources towards mitigating it. Bye-bye efforts to stop polio or malaria, the associated suffering is just not that great. If we are going to take this seriously, then there are two primary implications:
It behooves us to find out if some species experience net suffering
If there is a tremendous amount of net suffering, we should do something about it. If we are serious about maximizing the happiness and minimizing the suffering of conscious beings; there is no alternative. There is no notion of preferring non-interference over interference. And if commit to taking it seriously, then we need to start thinking about what we would do even before we fully answer the first question.
I'm not aware of any significant efforts in this field. While it's possible there are some researchers, this isn't something I've ever heard discussed in normal conversation. Our current approach can be roughly summed up as remarking "Oh, that rabbit's being eaten by the coyotes, how natural and wonderful." This seems like an unserious position to me from a moral standpoint.
If we really are going to take this seriously, we should make sure their lives aren’t net suffering.
It's hard to know how much suffering an animal is capable of, especially those more and more different from us. It's important to be humble about what we know and what we don't, and resist projection our own level of consciousness onto the rest of the animal kingdom. But I think we can risk going too far with that. We can make logical inferences about animal suffering to get a rough estimate. A squealing pig being eaten by a mountain lion is definitively suffering.
The second implication, as I stated, is that if the first were true, we would have to do something. Do what? I don't know. What would we do? There is a strong tendency not to touch things. To let wild be wild. Is this actually a morally defensible position? It’s some form of “I didn’t break it, so I won’t touch it?” But if your neighbor is abusing their child, there’s nearly universal agreement that you should interfere. Is it, “Our species didn’t break it, so I won’t touch it?”
I don't see how we could convince all the tadpole-eating birds, snakes, and rodents of the world to stop eating tadpoles. Given the defenselessness of a tadpole, I can't think of any interventionist policies that would reduce their suffering that wouldn't destroy other ecosystems (e.g. kill all the birds). So, does that mean you remove them from the wild? What if it's a species you couldn't bring inside and make cute little aquariums for? In order to minimize suffering, should we exterminate the species whose lives are mostly suffering?
Currently, I'm against taking it seriously. I think I'm in favor of pretending it's not a thing. I'll keep revising my position, but I can't imagine advocating for us to cause a species to go extinct in the wild because that species has so much net suffering. Even if we conclude with absolute certainty that a species experiences constant suffering, the ecosystem impacts are negligible, and it's clearly a net positive for conscious beings, I couldn't imagine myself advocating for it.
Why the contradiction? I'm probably struggling with it for a variety of reasons.
Deep skepticism that we would make anything better no matter how much we’ve convinced ourselves. I’m just too skeptical of us to advocate for something so impactful, counterintuitive, and irreversible. Would we ever be able to predict the ecological consequences with high enough accuracy? These systems seem too complex for that. If we determined the world would be much better without lions, maybe there’s an explosion of happy zebra and antelope. But then they consume all the grass and now there’s an ecological crash. It would take tremendous evidence to convince me we’ve accounted for all this for an animal that played a significant role in the ecosystem (a single species of mosquito might not play a large role if there are competing species, and my bar would be significantly lower).
I can't imagine the scale of change that it would involve. I made up the number 99% when I mentioned concluding that most of the suffering takes place in the wild, but I don’t think that number is crazy. If certain species experience net suffering, I don't think a number like that is out of the question. How much can an ant suffer? Are they capable of one-millionth as much suffering as we are? I don’t know, but this might be low-balling them. Ants have a larger brain size relative to their bodies than we do. What does this mean in terms of conscious suffering? I don't know. But we can't assume they don't suffer.
So let’s assume ants can suffer one-millionth the amount humans can. I have no idea how many ants there are but this NPR article says "10 billion billion" (big "thanks" to the underpaid grad student who counted them all!). If their lives are net suffering, our suffering would be a drop in the bucket compared to theirs. So would that of all our livestock. If we concluded the suffering of insects was a major problem it would have enormous implications on the way we think about making the world a better place (there goes the idea or farming crickets to be more humane to livestock). Why does this make me resistant to taking this seriously? Simply put, my poor little human brain is weak and I'm not prepared for implications this large.
No one else is taking it seriously, and I'm blending in with the pack. I imagine if this were an oft-talked-about topic, I would have thought about it more. But it's not, and with this piece, I have written one more blog post about the topic than probably 99.99999% of people in the world.
If I did conclude that this was the most important thing in the world, I’m not sure what I would do. There's about a 99% chance (plus or minus 1%) that I couldn't get other people to take me seriously. There’s almost no chance I could steer the millions or billions of federal funding required to do whatever corrective action turned out to be needed. So I'd end up wandering around, telling seahorses to keep gratitude journals (their situation could be remedied) and sterilizing queen ants (their suffering is beyond mitigation).
P.S.
Sometimes I wonder if AGI will ever be able to develop a sense of morality. I think it's something we evolved, and as I've written about before, I don't think it follows logic. So how would AGI figure out morality if it's just based on human intuition? I guess one way would be to simulate humans, see how they act and what they consider moral.
Imagine they run into a moral quandary - they see that human lives are net suffering and they don't know what to do. They didn't cause the net suffering, but does that mean they shouldn't intervene? So they set up a simulation where we find a species that experiences net suffering. We decide this is a bad thing and since the species has evolved into such a sad, depressing, mess, the only thing is to remove that species from existence. And it turns out that's the last thing that humans ever do.