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Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.
Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts.
Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: To try to get a sense of scale, let’s imagine if 8.2 billion humans fit on the face of a quarter, that 88 billion wild mammals would take up the size of a credit card. For birds, let’s say there are about 200 billion, would be a standard envelope. Reptiles and amphibians, somewhere around two trillion put together. A trillion would be a sheet of paper. And then 10 trillion fish, so a medium-sized desk.
I think it is mind-boggling to try to imagine the number of invertebrates. So for those that live on land, estimates are around 100,000 trillion. If 8.2 billion humans fit on the face of a quarter, 100,000 trillion would need to be something the size of a FIFA regulation-size soccer field.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s insane!
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So if you imagine standing at any point in a soccer field and looking at a quarter, it really changes your perspective on who’s really living here.
Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners. This is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
Rationally, I know there are incomprehensibly many wild animals in the world, and it seems totally possible that lots of their experiences cause them to suffer in ways we would find tragic if they were humans: burning alive in wild fires, dying of excruciating diseases, losing their young, starving.
But the idea of meddling in nature or assuming what’s good for wild animals has sometimes felt risky and over-confident at best, and totally irresponsible and intractable at worst. How are we supposed to know what it feels like to be a tree frog — and even if we did, could we even help them without causing weird, unpredictable effects to other animals in the ecosystem?
So I’m very excited to share with you the conversation I had with Cameron Meyer Shorb, the executive director of Wild Animal Initiative. He talked me through loads of concrete examples that really helped me understand both the scale of potential suffering — which is truly and utterly massive — and also some promising early approaches that this new research field is working on.
For the first time since learning about the problem of wild animal suffering in 2017, I feel some hope that there are actual interventions we might be able to implement to help wild animals without causing a bunch of unpredictable side effects to other animals and the environment — and that we’re on track to identify even more interventions like that.
We talk about:
How bad experiences like disease, parasites, and predation are for wild animals — and how we can even know.
Why it’s so difficult to try to alleviate suffering in nature without unintended consequences, and why Cam thinks we can make progress anyways.
The pros and cons of potential interventions like selective reforestation, vaccines, fire management, and gene drives.
Plus loads more.
Without further ado, I bring you Cameron Meyer Shorb.
Today I’m speaking with Cameron Meyer Shorb. Cam is the executive director of the Wild Animal Initiative, a nonprofit that supports cutting-edge research on wild animal welfare. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Cam. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Thank you so much, Luisa. I’m a huge fan of the podcast, and just so excited to be here and really excited to dive into this topic with you.
Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. OK, I want to dive into a question that really interests me, and then we’ll come back to setting up the problem of wild animal suffering.
So for a long time, my biggest objection to arguments in favour of wild animal suffering being a really big problem was around whether there was anything we could actually do about it. Like what would we do if we realised that wild animals were suffering tremendously? Would we just eliminate nature? That seems drastic and just not in line with my values.
But my sense now is that you think that there are at least some things that would be robustly good to do to address some of the suffering in wild nature. Can you give just one example of an intervention that you think is clearly good, and doesn’t require me to get on board with, “No more wild nature. It seems bad. Let’s get rid of it”?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. I think first I’ll just acknowledge that you are picking up on something very real here, which is that when we’re talking about wild animal welfare, we’re talking about a huge population of wild animals, and we do know shockingly little about how to help them. So most of the project right now is figuring out what we can do and how to do it well.
That being said, we definitely have ideas for what that might look like. One thing that I think is a good image to have in your mind as to what a scalable near-term intervention to help wild animals might look like could be selective reforestation. So the United Nations has a programme originally called REDD for incentivising farmers to plant forests in their fields to sequester carbon and help mitigate climate change.
It’s now called REDD+: the plus stands for how now the programme is not just about climate change; it’s also about conservation and sustainable development — so they’re encouraging communities to plant forests that will provide income streams to them.
You could imagine REDD++ could be conservation, sustainable development, climate mitigation, and also wild animal welfare. So when you’re planting a forest in most regions of the world, there are several different kinds of forests you would be able to plant — several different “stable states,” you might call them. So you could maybe plant a forest that is primarily pine trees, or another that’s primarily oak or some other broad-leaved tree.
And we already know that these types of forests support very different types of animals: different species, different abundances of those species, different combinations of them. And we don’t know right now exactly how to do this math, but you can imagine if we were able to make even very rough gestures at the total welfare of different animal populations, then we might be able to stack up the census of animal populations in each of these forestry options, and make a guess at which of these options supports more animals living fulfilled, flourishing lives, and leads to the existence of fewer animals that might suffer terribly.
If you were to find the answer to that, then this is something that you could just incorporate into existing land management policy. You could scale it across huge regions; you could adapt it to different circumstances. And it does require more empirical knowledge and methodologies than we have right now, but it doesn’t require any new technology.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I love that. I hadn’t heard that as a potential intervention at all before, and I feel super excited about it.
I know I’m putting you in a tough position by asking this, but do you have any guesses, even if they’re really early ones, about which ecosystems might have the most flourishing in them, or which ecosystems might have the most suffering in them?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I don’t know the answer to that. As I think we’ll get into later, there are a couple crucial uncertainties that could push things either way. I think the way to proceed on something like this, without having to answer every question there is to ask about wild animal welfare, would probably be to start by finding two systems that are fairly similar except for one key component. So maybe we find that two types of forests tend to host similar amounts of similar kinds of insect life, and similar amounts of similar kinds of bird life, but one is much more amenable to mammal life. Then at least we could narrow down the scope of the questions we’re asking, and research the particulars and make an informed guess there.
I guess that’s the last thing I’ll say: in a lot of domains, it’s helpful to do these back-of-the-envelope calculations, or broad guesses of what are the generalities. But I think in the context of wild systems and ecology, one thing that comes up again and again is that the particulars matter, and you often just can’t make generalisations that sweep worldwide. A lot of what ecology is is the game of trying to figure out when do things generalise from one system to another? What are the rules here? But the default expectation is that you won’t know everything before you look at the specifics.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel tempted to force you to name… I don’t know, like the tundra seems pretty bad, but I also think that it’s probably an area that requires a bunch of caution in how you talk about things, and it’s probably way more complicated than it sounds.
So for now, I just really like that I just haven’t heard of an example intervention that feels that divorced from spillover effects. So that feels really exciting to me.
We’ll come back to more interventions that you feel excited about. But first, let’s talk more about this as a problem. Fundamentally, why do you worry about suffering among wild animals? What kinds of things make you think that they might be suffering a lot in particular?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So I’m wildly uncertain about what the nature of wild animals’ lives are like. But I got into this field because I changed my mind about the possibilities here. I used to just assume that animals living in the wild were perfectly in balance, and living totally fulfilled lives, and weren’t bothered by any of the stresses of modernity like I am — and that the best thing humans could possibly do for them is just leave them alone there.
But the more I learned about it and thought about it, the more I realised that there’s actually lots of reasons to think that wild animals might not be living great lives, at least many of them. For example, they often have to struggle to get enough food. They often need to struggle to protect themselves from extreme weather. There are some kinds of things where they have no protection at all: if a flood or a wildfire comes, that’s just the end of it for them. There’s also all sorts of diseases or parasites. They have no healthcare. They also have no state to protect them from violence, either from other species or even members of their own species.
So the kinds of conditions we’re talking about here, when humans live in those conditions, we would call that poverty. And we wouldn’t tolerate that. We would say that those are problems we need to solve; those are people who deserve better lives. And if we have medicine, we should help give them access to medicine. If there’s ways to give them more stable access to food, that’s something that would improve their lives.
That’s the kind of approach that I now think we should consider taking when we think about wild animals: taking seriously the idea that they might be struggling even in their natural habitats, and they might suffer even from naturally occurring harms. And we should try to figure out to what extent that’s true, and if it’s possible to do anything about that.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I want to come back to some of those, because I feel like even though I’m a little bit familiar with this problem, I still have a super limited imagination for the kinds of things that wild animals — and obviously there’s such a wide range across different species — might be going through, aside from the really obvious one being eaten or something.
So putting a pin in that, what is the scale of the problem? How many individuals alive right now are wild animals?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: The scale is huge. It’s bigger than I can count. I’ve been humbled by learning about this, but I do think the scale is such an important part of understanding the problem.
Just in the broadest possible strokes, based on the rough numbers we know, it looks like something like 99% of all sentient minds alive on Earth today are wild animals. So if you are a human or a farmed animal, that is an incredibly rare exception to the rule, which is: things that can feel live in the wild. You’re more of a rounding error than anything.
Which is not to say that human and farmed animal experiences aren’t important; it’s just to say there is a lot more going on. And a truly impartial view of ethics would have us believe that ethics is mostly about wild animals… and also there are these interesting subfields that are related to some primates and farmed animals.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK, I’m interested in breaking down the numbers a bit more. I feel like it seems at least kind of important to know, are we mostly thinking about zebras, or are we mostly thinking about fish, ants…? What to think about feels like it could have helpful effects in helping me figure out, what are we talking about?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: That’s a great question to ask, because I think that the images that normally come to mind are not the most representative of wild animals. Most minds are wild, weird, and wet. They’re just not humans or human-like things.
To try to get a sense of scale, I’ll suggest a visualisation. Let’s imagine for the sake of this exercise that we’re going to put a dot down of equal size for any individual that’s alive. So one dot for a human, one dot for a squirrel — and you can debate later how you want to make tradeoffs across species — but just for starters, to get a sense of the raw numbers.
Now, let’s make these dots small enough so that we can fit all 8.2 billion humans onto the face of a quarter or a euro — so something a little smaller than one square inch.
If we’re keeping that scale, then the 88 billion wild mammals would take up an area about the size of a credit card or a post-it note.
And then when we move on to birds — and I should say these estimates are all very rough, and the bigger the populations, the wider the error bars are — but for birds, let’s say there are about 200 billion living in the wild. That would be something about the size of a standard envelope.
And then for reptiles and amphibians, each of those numbers somewhere around one trillion individuals, two trillion put together. So a trillion would be a standard sheet of paper. I think this is a good place to pause and just think about how far we’ve come: from a quarter to an envelope, which is way bigger than a quarter, to a couple sheets of paper compared to a quarter that contains all of human experience and 8.2 billion lives. There’s that, times many, many more, if you’re trying to encompass humans and mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians.
Then the numbers get even more mind-boggling when we move on to fish. There’s something like 10 trillion fish in the world. So 10 trillion fish would be something like the size of a medium-sized desk — the Linnmon from Ikea, if you will — or a large bath mat, or a couple of pillowcases maybe. That’s what the whole fish population would look like, relative to the human population fitting on a quarter.
And the numbers get really… I don’t know what “to boggle” means literally, but I think it is something like what is happening to my mind. I think it is mind-boggling to try to imagine the number of plausibly sentient invertebrates. So the only at all close-to-useful number I found here is an estimate of the number of terrestrial arthropods — that would be animals with hard exoskeletons, like insects and arachnids and crustaceans. So for those that live on land, estimates are that their population is somewhere around 100,000 trillion. If 8.2 billion humans fit on the face of a quarter, 100,000 trillion would need to be something the size of a city block or a FIFA regulation-size soccer field.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s insane!
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Imagine standing at any point in a soccer field and looking at a quarter and then looking around at the rest of the field. It really changes your perspective on what life on Earth is like, who’s really living here. And it’s hard to know whether many arthropods are sentient. I think there’s decent questions and considerations on either side. But one of the things that I think is important to consider is the expected value. So even if there’s just a 10% chance that they are, 10% of a soccer field is still way bigger than a quarter.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. This makes me really happy that some of our most recent episodes… One is with Meghan Barrett, one of my favourite episodes of all time, on invertebrate sentience. And really, it took me well above 10% probability or credence that invertebrates are sentient. Another one is on fish with Sébastien Moro, just infinite numbers of bewildering facts about fish.
For me, invertebrates and fish both make up tremendous numbers of individuals, as you’ve just said, and just are clearly at least very plausible sentience candidates. For the case of fish, it seems hard to even debate for me. So given that these are the animals making up most of the wild nature we’re talking about, for anyone who’s interested, I can recommend those episodes.
Can you say more about what we know about what it’s like to be a wild animal?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So first, two big caveats. One, there’s a huge diversity of wild animals. That’s one of the things that makes this field so fun to work in, is that there’s just all these different ways of surviving in the world. Two, for each of those types of animals, there’s of course way less research than we would like there to be on the specifically welfare-relevant questions of what does it feel like to them to live their lives, and what are the most common outcomes for them of different scenarios, et cetera.
Having said that, to sort of practice getting out of some of the assumptions that I think we normally make, maybe I can use a frog as an example of a wild animal for us to think about. Many of us think about wild animals, and the first one that comes to mind is some sort of large African mammal we’ve seen on National Geographic. But as we talked about with the numbers, reptiles and amphibians outnumber other land vertebrates by an order of magnitude or two.
So let’s choose a frog. Choose a generic frog. Sorry, frogs, for not knowing your names better. I would like to get to know my neighbours better, but that’s what we have to work with.
First thing is that many wild animals are born in great numbers. In the case of frogs, there’s many eggs, sometimes a couple hundred or a couple thousand eggs for one parent per year, and then those eggs hatch into tadpoles.
So one of the first things that we want to know about what it’s like to be a wild animal is what’s it like to be a juvenile wild animal? Because every wild animal is going to be a juvenile, but not all of them are going to make it to adulthood. In fact, I would say in the majority of animals, in terms of total headcount, the majority of juveniles don’t make it to adulthood — so a lot of what it is to be a frog is what it is to be a tadpole.
The next sorts of things we would want to know are: What’s the daily life like for an animal of a given type in a given life stage in a given area? So for tadpoles: What are they eating? What do they need to do to find shelter? Are they avoiding predators? Are there pathogens? What are their main needs, and how are they meeting them? And what are the major threats, and how common are those, and how intense are those?
One of the ways that we’re exploring to very roughly model wild animal welfare is with these life history charts. Life history in biology refers to broadly the life stages an animal goes through, the amount of offspring they have, at what ages they tend to die, those kinds of things. So we’d like to add more colour to those by asking these kinds of questions of: When they do die, what are they dying of? How painful are those causes of death relative to each other? And for their good days, what are those days like?
Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Do we have that for frogs?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: We do have that for some frog species and not for others. I’ll note just on the diversity point, most frog species that I know of take this approach of having a whole tonne of offspring that don’t have any parental care, they go off and survive in the wild. This is a sort of high-risk, high-reward approach to trying to pass your genes on.
But even for frogs, that’s not always true. There are some poison dart frogs, for example, that will lay just three to six eggs in a tiny puddle in a leaf in a rainforest. When those hatch, they will put the little tadpoles onto their backs, and they stay there with a sort of mucus covering, and then they climb all the way up a tree to a little puddle inside a certain kind of plant, and they put the tadpoles back there, and they come back every day to feed them bugs.
Humans have a similar kind of approach to child rearing, and I think it’s neat that some frogs do that too. Not to be too speciesist, but I do think that a life history in which there’s lower infant mortality is likely to be a life history that tends to have higher welfare, because you just have a lower ratio of death to minutes lived.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. OK, so there’s the juvenile stage — which in some frogs will look like actual parenting of some kind, rearing by a parent, and then there’s some juveniles that are being left to their own devices and maybe more likely to die as a juvenile.
I feel like there are two risks here. One is anthropomorphising, and I’m at a point where my tendency is probably to overly anthropomorphise. I have this vision of this mother frog putting the little frogs on her back and caring about them and wanting all of them to make it to the tree, and wanting them not to be hungry and wanting none of them to die, and maybe feeling something like loss or panic or dread if their young are being threatened.
Then there’s also this other risk, which is maybe that that mother is doing something very robotic and reflexive. I have this sense that sea turtles do this thing by bringing their eggs onto a beach, and that that behaviour seems incredibly ingrained and old, and less about choices and strong emotions — though I’m obviously completely making this up. But it seems like you could imagine it being true that a mother frog is doing something more like that. They’re just like, “This is just what I do. These are the rules that have been programmed into my brain by evolution.”
How worried about each of these risks are you?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think they’re both worth worrying about. There are times when we anthropomorphise too much and project things onto animals, and don’t do a good job listening or observing or asking, and then we miss important parts of their experience. And then there are times when we are too reluctant to assign to them emotions like the ones we have.
I’m really glad that you mentioned the idea of imagining some animals as robotic automatons. There is a lot of debate within behavioural ecology and animal psychology and related disciplines around when anthropomorphism is appropriate, or what constitutes anthropomorphism, et cetera.
If there are any generalities to be made about how and when to apply it, my guess is that it’s most useful when you’re using anthropomorphism as a way to generate hypotheses about what the richness of an animal’s interior life might look like, and least useful when you are trying to use it to make specific assumptions about what that animal must feel like.
So in the sea turtle example, you’re totally right: many sea turtles have this life history where they come to a particular beach. Most of these sea turtles will return to the same beach year after year and they lay eggs. In the case of green sea turtles, this is often in the range of 50 to 150 eggs. And then the mother sea turtle leaves. She buries the eggs so they’re protected. Some number of weeks later, the eggs hatch — and each of them, totally on their own, with no help from the parent, has to make it to the sea.
It would be, I think, too anthropomorphising to imagine that that mother sea turtle leaving the beach is feeling her heart absolutely rendered by having to leave her babies behind. That just doesn’t really make sense for them. That’s not a motivation that would be useful for her lifestyle. But she might have a different kind of feeling: upon coming to the beach, there might be a kind of yearning or anticipation, or maybe it’s anxiety or maybe it’s thrill.
But there’s probably something that it feels like to want to go back to that beach, to cross huge stretches of ocean to go to one particular place. And then there’s probably something that it feels like to have done that job, and to leave and to go back to your own life, and now to only have to feed your own body and not have to carry all those eggs around.
So I think the comparisons to human experience can be useful for generating hypotheses about what kinds of things might it feel like to do this behaviour, but then we shouldn’t narrow in on any one of those without more evidence from the animal’s behaviour or their physiology or any number of ways we might collect indicators for their welfare.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I really like the idea of using anthropomorphism to generate hypotheses, but then not anchoring too hard on them. To help us generate some intuitive hypotheses, even if we don’t necessarily take them too seriously, can you say more about the ways in which wild animals might suffer?
I think when I first started learning about this topic, I had a very specific picture in mind. When I imagined wild animal suffering, it was something like a pack of lions taking down a baby wildebeest — so, predation. Now I have the impression that there’s actually a wide range of things that wild animals probably experience that might be causing them to suffer or might be causing them joy. Does that sound right? And if so, what categories of experiences should I be thinking of?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I’m not sure that I have an exhaustive list, but I tend to think of it in terms of how they live and how they die.
So how they live: How do they meet their basic needs? What kinds of food do they eat? How abundant is that? How easy is that to get? Part of that is the actual experience of grazing or hunting or foraging. And part of it is also about the abundance of food, which is not just a fixed absolute value, but also a feature of the amount of competition with other members of the same species or other species. So how hard is it to get food?
How hard is it to avoid exposure to the weather? I think this is something that people might underestimate about the difficulty of living in the wild, because we think animals are just born with the perfect raincoats or whatever, and they have everything they need all the time. But many animals need to navigate a range of environments, a range of weather events — and they can do it, but it’s a matter of getting under the bark at the right time or getting to the right side of the mountain or something. So how hard is that to do, and what happens when you don’t do it?
Other kinds of experiences during life can be: What are your experiences like when you interact with other species? Interactions with other members of the same species? As humans, we tend to have positive interactions. We’re social animals. Many animals are primarily solitary and interact with other members of their own species primarily to compete or to defend territory.
And then of course there’s mating. There’s a whole range of ways that could be for wild animals, because there’s such a wide range of reproductive systems — some of which I think are pretty pleasurable to undergo, some of which I think are pretty excruciating.
Then there’s interactions with other species. So that could be competition with other species for food. It could of course be predation or preying upon other animals.
And that kind of gets into the other big bucket of types of causes of suffering: things that could cause death or dramatically decrease animals’ health. Disease is a big one. That can come from pathogens or from parasites. Again, looking at weather, there can be extreme weather events like fires or storms or floods.
And then there can be predation: What kinds of predators are there? How stressful is it to avoid those predators? When you are getting eaten, what is that experience? How long does it last? What are the physiological reactions to that experience?
I don’t know that I’ve hit them all, but that I think is a brief survey of the types of things that we think about and like to ask questions about.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really helpful. Are there other key hypotheses for what the suffering might be constituted by that I’m missing that you think are especially important?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I might create one more category which is just like “other” or “things that are hard to relate to as humans.” Maybe this would be something like frustration of goals. For animals that migrate, it could be the case that not being able to migrate or being confused about where they’re going could be very stressful. I don’t really know for an electric eel living in murky water what the most uncomfortable things are, but I would not be surprised if it’s something that I couldn’t have thought of on my own without asking the eel. So I think we should leave space for that.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s talk about some more specifics. What are some of the ways that wild animals die?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think of them loosely in two categories: the slow ways of dying and the faster ways of dying.
The slower ways of dying for many wild animals would be things like dying of starvation, or dying of the cold or many kinds of disease. Some kinds of poison take days or weeks to take effect. Those are all things where I think the experience is often one of being in a weakened sickly state for days or weeks, and then those often end up increasing an animal’s chance of dying from some of the quicker causes of death — which are not necessarily quick enough for any of them to sound particularly fun.
Foremost among these is predation — which, despite our go-to mental image of lions attacking a wildebeest, more often looks like a much bigger animal swallowing another much smaller animal whole. And then other faster deaths could be forms of accidents or injuries. Dying of collisions with vehicles is pretty common for many animals in many parts of the world. And then there’s things like other extreme weather events — being burned alive in a fire, or drowning in a flood, things like that.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I find I really have to think about it to really understand how bad these might be. Even dying of a disease or poison or hunger, I somehow have this intuition that’s like, “Surely it can’t be that bad, because it happens so often and it’s so natural.”
And then obviously we don’t know exactly how human experiences of these things differ from wild animals’ experiences of these things. But even if it’s just a tiny glimpse at what it would be like, like, I hate being normal sick with the flu. That sucks. But being ill enough to die is horrific. And I feel like I need to really actually just sit with that, and not let my mind do gymnastics to be like, “Probably these things aren’t that bad, because then that would be terrible. That would bode really badly for wild animal existence.”
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I do think there’s one potential reassurance there — the goal of which is not to reassure ourselves, but try to maintain as much as possible an evidence-backed approach to imagining what wild animals’ lives might be like. And this is discussed in a great paper by Heather Browning and Walter Veit, “Positive wild animal welfare.” They’re basically presenting a whole bunch of arguments for why life in the wild might not be as bad as we think it is. It’s a really great paper; I highly recommend it.
One of the things they point out is that a reasonable hypothesis for the evolutionary value of pain is that it often seems to direct animals to take action. So the pain of a wound would direct an animal to pay attention to that wound, to not put too much pressure on that foot, to try to clean it, and things like that. Those actions are often not the actions that are relevant in the actual moment when you’re escaping from a predator, so it might be that there’s a shock response that protects animals from the intense pain we would otherwise expect from having those kinds of wounds in that moment.
And that’s reflective of experiences that humans report of being in a car crash, or bitten by a crocodile, or all sorts of things — where people have reported that they were aware that there was a huge gash in their leg, and they knew it was bad, but it was not actually a pain sensation. They were mostly just entirely focused on getting out of there. And then once they got out of there, then the pain washes over them.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that does feel reassuring. I guess probably some wild animals do escape an attack and then have that, and then also not have hospitals. I also just have this sense that it’s true that at the end of some long, terrible diseases, humans seem to be less conscious of the suffering those diseases are causing them. But I feel like for most diseases, humans still need loads of morphine and other medicinal intervention to not make it literally torturous. So maybe I feel reassured for like some subset of cases where shock is probably a really useful thing to experience.
Which makes me curious: Do we have any idea what the most common way to die is? Is it mostly these shocks, predation things, or is it mostly disease and parasites and hunger?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think the best resource that we found so far on causes of death is this paper, “Cause-specific mortality of the world’s terrestrial vertebrates” by Hill and colleagues in 2019. It was a meta-analysis of all the studies they could find on this question of what do different animals die of. It was entirely or almost entirely terrestrial animals, and entirely vertebrates. But at least for the ones they studied, predation was the largest cause of death for the majority of the taxa that they studied — like 50% to 90% of most groups. So I do think that’s something we need to consider.
I do think it’s important to, again, check our image of what predation looks like for small animals, especially juveniles of small animals. It might not be being torn apart by a pack of wolves, but rather just being gulped by a bird or a bigger fish or something.
Luisa Rodriguez: Which also sounds terrible to me! I was listening to a podcast about owls recently, and it was saying that they also consume their prey whole, and I was like, wow, maybe they’re being digested by stomach acid. That sounds maybe worse to me than having some important artery clawed through and then quickly dying through blood loss or something. So I find this idea that actually many small animals might be gulped whole really actually quite awful.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, thank you for mentioning that. I feel like I was taking on something of a dismissive tone. This doesn’t mean things are fine. It means things might be different than we think, and we definitely don’t know how they are. But yeah, being dissolved by stomach acid might be terrible. There might be other circumstances in which being swallowed whole means that you are quickly crushed or that you suffocate maybe before you fully dissolve. But yeah, I think there’s probably a lot of stomach acid in the mix, and that’s probably pretty terrible. So yeah, predation is a tricky issue.
I do also want to say that even if it turns out to be one of the biggest causes of suffering in the wild, it is still one of the hardest, if not the hardest, problem to solve — simply because we have found that when you remove or reduce predator populations, that is one of the scenarios that most reliably causes lots of indirect effects in ecosystems. So that’d be a particularly risky move.
And it’s also a case of tradeoffs between one animal species who’s very likely to be sentient and another animal species who’s very likely to be sentient — as opposed to when animals are simply suffering from weather conditions or viruses or an absence of food: these are not direct tradeoffs; there are just no winners in that situation.
So I guess I often want to push people into the direction of thinking about other areas of wild animal suffering. But seeing this meta-analysis of the research that’s been done so far was a helpful reminder to me that predation still might be a huge cause of suffering, whether or not we can do anything about it soon.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. How confident can we be about stuff like this?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So that’s really our first glimpse into what these things look like, but cause of death is something that is really not understood. It has not received as much attention historically as I would like it to, given its importance to wild animal welfare.
But also, even if you are trying to do the best wild animal welfare science you can, it’s a really hard thing to study, because dead animals are often not around anymore. It’s just something where you either need to be there to witness it, or you need to have some way of estimating the frequency. And it’s really hard to know, even when you do collect data, to what extent your data is representative or if there’s sampling bias. There’s really every reason to think there will be sampling bias, and that some kinds of causes of death will be easier to detect than others. So everything we claim to know about wild animal welfare we need to take with a grain of salt. This is a particularly big chunk of salt.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to wonder how we figure out how wild animals die, but when I try to put it together for myself, I’m like, so do you have to go looking for wild animal carcasses and then do autopsies? Or guess, based on things you can see about them? And then even then, like even finding the carcasses sounds hard. That feels extremely hard, and is giving me a bit of a glimpse into how hard scientists in this field must find their work.
Are there other things that, if you imagine being reborn as a random animal in the wild, you would be like, “Ugh, that experience I’m dreading. I really am not looking forward to it”?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I don’t know how representative this is of the frequencies or risks out there, but I do worry a lot about parasites and pathogens. So animals have no healthcare whatsoever, except for sometimes their own knowledge of medicinal plants or things like that, which has been observed in several species.
But many animals have just really high parasite loads, to a degree that most modern humans just never experience. For example, I was just reading a study about moose in northwestern Minnesota that found the primary cause of death was one of several parasites, one that’s a parasite on the liver. Increasingly now, with climate change, moose are dying from tick infestations where they are just covered in so many ticks that juveniles will need to replace over half of their blood. And they’ll die. The proximate cause is starvation or malnutrition, but it’s because they just have literally thousands of ticks draining blood off of them.
I mentioned before the dangers of over-indexing on large, unusual animals, but this is something that we do see at lots of different scales. I have friends who put in a lot of time rescuing injured pigeons and rats in the city, and they say they find lots of ectoparasites on them as well. So that’s something that I worry about quite a bit.
As we’ve discussed, it’s super hard to just blindly apply our intuitions at how bad something might be and reliably get the answer. But one kind of guiding principle there might be thinking about the adaptive value of feeling pain or not feeling pain in certain circumstances. And when I think about hunger or starvation, for example, that seems like something where I can imagine animals having just developed a high tolerance for temporary absences of food. Even humans can do this in certain circumstances. But parasites seem like the kind of thing where they’re just abnormal enough that they might cause continuous suffering, and it might not be the kind of thing you get used to. And then they might last long enough that they could cause a lot of suffering over time.
My understanding is that when you ask people to estimate how bad different ailments would be, and then when you survey people with those ailments, people tend to way overestimate how bad something like losing an arm is, and way underestimate how bad something like having chronic low-level back pain is. So parasites and pathogens could fit in that category of something that might just linger for a long time.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. Are there any other kind of key ailments I should be imagining when I imagine having a parasite?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think parasites can get really nasty. I haven’t done the most research into this, but if you ever talk to someone who has, just the look on their face when they start talking about parasites makes you think, maybe I don’t want to read what they’ve read.
There are just so many ways to break down a body slowly, and parasites have found many of those advantageous to them: there’s burrowing into skin, there’s depriving them of nutrients, there’s getting into the nervous system — which can directly cause pain or can cause animals to do painful things, so maybe that’s part of it too.
In this case, it’s honestly just really hard for me to tell how much I’m reacting to evidence, and how much I’m just kind of gripped by a gut-level horror at the bizarreness of these things. But the sheer diversity of ways that parasites seem to cause tremendous amounts of pain makes them something that I worry about a lot when we think about animals in the wild.
Luisa Rodriguez: Oof. OK, how common is starvation? I guess there’s starving to death, but there’s also just being very, very hungry for a long time, without it necessarily killing you — at least, acutely.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. I do think that not having enough food is probably quite a common occurrence. We know that there are populations that are top-down regulated — which is to say that the size of the population is limited by the amount of predation that happens, and the reason there aren’t more animals is because they’re getting predated upon or the other causes of death.
But there’s also a pretty common occurrence, which is bottom-up regulation: when the population is limited by the amount of resources they have available to them. So it might be the case that you have a stable population, and what’s keeping it stable is that animals are starving at a rate that’s high enough that it matches up with the fertility rate — and you’re shrinking as much as you’re growing, and that’s what is keeping the population stable.
For me, the biggest big question mark here comes from not only the frequency of this, but what animals’ subjective experience of this is. Because you can imagine a variety of experiences, right? It might be that the gnawing, constant, intense sensation of hunger is something that drives animals to seek food more. It might be the case that animals don’t feel as much pain from hunger if it’s something that they do regularly encounter.
I think it’s really interesting how much humans vary on this. Sometimes people of different cultures or religious practices will practice fasting. I will be in intense hunger pain after six hours, and other people can go 10 days before they feel that kind of thing. So I’m not sure how bad it is, but it does seem like it’s quite common, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite bad.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. On the one hand, it seems like discomfort and pain are probably really important for motivation, and probably motivation to keep searching for food is really helpful. On the other hand, very sustained, intense pain doesn’t seem that helpful. And now I’m just really talking outside of my expertise here, but it does seem like a case where I can imagine things going either way.
Is there a category that has to do with social stress? I feel like I’ve got a few bits and pieces that I know about, how at least some species, like chickens, have very defined social hierarchies. And it seems like a big source of suffering for some chickens in some environments is literally the pecking order, and how that affects their lives. It seems like social hierarchies is a common thing, and maybe just isn’t something that’s super intuitive to people to think about — but social hierarchies certainly define a lot of how my experience is.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think you’re totally right that for animals that live in groups, particularly set groups that stay together, social interactions are a huge part of their welfare. And I think there’s some of those experiences that are very relatable to us. You mentioned chickens among a flock, there being a pecking order that’s established by acts of aggression and bullying, and then sort of repeated low-level bullying to maintain that order. I think that’s somewhat easy for us to imagine.
I also think this is a great example of one of those areas where we need to be careful to not overlook the positive experiences that wild animals undergo. Relatively recently there’s been more research coming out about animal friendship.
For example, where if you track a whole flock of birds or a population of birds, basically if you do anything other than put little bands on them and keep very careful track of exactly where each individual goes, you’ll miss the fact that in a flock of pretty similar-looking birds, they don’t disperse themselves randomly. At least for some of the species that have been observed, they often demonstrate patterns of consistently foraging near another one who’s not a member of their family, who’s not a potential mate.
There’s also been evidence of these bonds being sustained over time and over huge amounts of distance. Migratory sparrows that go a couple thousand miles for the winter and then come back a couple thousand miles in the summer, they’re back with their same buddy — and they might have made that whole trip with their buddy. So that could be a very nice thing; losing friends could be a very hard thing. Those are some of the experiences that I think are particularly relatable.
I also think it’s important to hold space for the social experiences that might be harder to relate to. One thing that comes to mind here is seals who have a mating social system wherein there’s one dominant bull seal who establishes a harem — that’s the technical word — of females that he defends against from all other males. So what ends up happening is the vast majority of males don’t get to mate. Lions have a similar mating system.
That might feel like an extreme form of inceldom that is hard for most humans to relate to, because these males, you know, this isn’t something they just give up and accept. This is something where they will go back and fight to try to take over these harems and win the opportunity to reproduce. And these fights can be extremely damaging and sometimes deadly. So if you are so deprived of the ability to have sex that you would fight and risk your life for it, maybe that’s something we can relate to and maybe it’s not.
I just think there are many different kinds of animal social interactions, and for the animals who do live in groups, I think that probably is a huge component of their welfare.
Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, that’s fascinating. Because you hinted at positive experience, I wonder if a lot of what we’ve been talking about — death, illness, some negative social interactions — makes up a small or large fraction of animals’ lives. Is it mostly just boringly grazing, or is it mostly kind of enjoyably grazing next to your friend? Or is it mostly a lot of time spent very hungry, very cold, very wet, or grieving the death of your child or buddy?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Again, hard to make generalisations about, but I think it is important to remember that the intense negative events that we’re thinking about happen in the context of a whole life. I think it’s quite likely that there are many sources of happiness in that life.
And there’s also, I think, a lot of… I don’t know what to call it. Downtime, maybe? Something that strikes me all the time when I’m observing pretty much any kind of animal in the wild is they just spend a lot of time doing nothing, or at least what looks like nothing, just sort of sitting there.
You’ll see this on the beach: you’ll see a flock of seagulls just sitting and looking into the wind. And that’s just what they’re doing. And I don’t know if that feels boring, if they’re feeling mildly anxious that they don’t have food, or is that just kind of the equivalent of sitting on the porch chatting with your buddies? Is that just a mild, nicely valenced experience? And maybe it’s more than mild. Maybe the experience of not needing to run from anything or not needing to get any food and knowing that you can just sit there, maybe that feels really good.
So yeah, we really don’t know. I do think an important part of understanding animals’ lives will be applying our emerging methodologies of estimating welfare to try to construct these sort of lifetime budget schematics, where we roughly break it down into, how much time do they spend in what kinds of states? How good or bad are those kinds of states? That at least can give us a structure to our research agenda.
Luisa Rodriguez: How much wild animal experience do you think might be neutral or positive? I guess I’m kind of suspicious that much experience is neutral. I don’t have very many perfectly neutral experiences. But like benign-ish or positive?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. I’m interested by your sense that you don’t have many neutral experiences. I feel like a lot of my experiences are close to neutral. I have a little mood journal that I fill in each day at the end of the day, was that a good day? And I’m often like, “Umm…” and I have to think for a couple moments. So maybe that’s a matter of things outweighing each other.
As with almost all things wild animal welfare, I have huge uncertainty here. But I think part of the uncertainty I’ve discussed before about painful experiences, it goes the other way too: if those things are not as painful as they think, there might actually just be way more experiences or much larger expanse of time spent in states that are somewhat close to neutral, maybe only slightly negative, maybe slightly positive, or maybe very positive.
When I think, for example, about a rabbit grazing in a field, I can imagine that occupying almost the full range of states. Rabbits are extremely vulnerable to predators. They perk their ears up at the slightest disturbance. That’s because there really is a very high risk that they’ll die that day, and they may be ready to run for their life. So maybe that feels like terror, and maybe they’re constantly on guard.
My best guess is that they’re not constantly at full terror mode, because that seems like it would not leave you much room to dial up the dial more if you needed to. So maybe it’s something more like commuting in a car on a particularly rainy day or something, when the roads are slippery and you’re kind of stressed. And you’re doing the thing you normally do each day, but it is tricky, and you do know there’s a risk that you could die if you fuck this up, so try to keep your eyes on the road. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be a rabbit grazing in a field. It’s like, “This is my thing, this is my work, I’ve got to do it. But there are real risks here, so don’t get sloppy.”
I can also imagine it being at the very far end of a quite pleasant thing. Sometimes when I get to lie in a field in the sunlight and eat food, it’s very nice. I think that’s primarily because these are leisure times in an extremely leisurely, exceptionally privileged life. But when you talk to people living in conditions where they have much less material wealth, people are often surprised at how much day-to-day happiness they still have.
So it could be the case that a rabbit’s experience is that there are moments of terror, but that the baseline is a sort of satisfaction that they are doing the thing that they want to do. And I think rabbit populations are one of those populations where, to the extent that they’re limited by food availability, it’s probably winter food availability — and in the summer there’s just more food than they could ever eat, so they’re kind of feasting all the time. That might be really nice. It might be nicer than the lives you and I lead where we’re kind of constantly stressed about doing our work and how bad we should feel about that.
Luisa Rodriguez: What do we do with all of that uncertainty? Do we have any way of knowing whether a rabbit’s experience of grazing in a field is more like terror or more like leisure? It just seems so hard…
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Right. So I think those are answerable questions, is the bottom line. Sentience is a very hard thing to really concretely understand. You can’t really measure the thing itself, and there’s all these uncertainties. But at the end of the day, we do have babies, we do have dogs: they don’t know how to talk, but we do a pretty good job keeping them happy, right? So I think that’s proof of concept that you can use indicators of welfare to make some good decisions, at least about the biggest things, the biggest sources of happiness or suffering or whatever.
With respect to questions like, Are animals happy when they’re grazing? Are animals afraid of predators? I do think that these are questions that are going to have to be answered for each species or each group of animals in its own context. There just is a lot of diversity of life on Earth, and this is part of the project of wild animal welfare science is learning to listen to everyone else.
But the tools we have to ask those kinds of questions are somewhat generalisable, and I divide those into the physical indicators of welfare and the behavioural indicators of welfare.
Physical indicators would be things like looking at the condition of the body. You can also look at their external appearance: do they seem to have injuries or disease?
You can look at neurotransmitters or glucocorticoids (commonly called stress hormones) in the blood, other hormones, body temperature. So the effects of our mental states are manifested in many ways in our bodies, and by measuring those, we can get some useful information on animals’ interior states.
And then the final set of physical indicators is genetic indicators: looking at things like biomarkers of ageing can be used as proxies for the cumulative physiological stress that an animal has undergone over their lifetime. We’ve done some work to validate this, and there’s more work that needs to be done. But this is the kind of thing that might be broadly useful across many kinds of animals, right? Because that basic structure of DNA is preserved across all of animal life.
And then of course, there are the behavioural indicators, which are the ones we use for our children and pets and others — looking at things like vocalisations, activity, are they inactive, what sort of posture are they holding, are they engaging in activities like play or showing fearful behaviour?
Then there are these cognition or decision-relevant behavioural indicators. You can actually set up experimental tests to see which things animals prefer. This has been done for chickens to develop some of the information we use to inform what conditions they prefer in factory farming contexts.
You can also do the same with wild animals. As you can imagine, setting up these choice experiments in the wild is tricky, but not always impossible, and you can set up these forced-choice experiments to see which things animals prefer that can sort of inform which of these things is better for the animal.
You can also use them to assess what mental state is the animal in right now. For example, you can measure whether they seem to be showing a certain amount of cognitive bias, like pessimism. The hypothesis is that if the animal makes fewer efforts to look for food in areas where it had previously been trained there might be food, that might demonstrate pessimism, and that might indicate a just overall negative affect.
As you can see, there are a lot of assumptions that underlie a lot of these things, and no single method is perfect. Our general advice to researchers is: one, there’s no silver bullet; you want to use multiple different methods, ideally of different types — so some physical, some behavioural.
And then there are also, among these methods, some that we have more confidence in than others. For that reason, it’s helpful to design experiments in a way where you have at least one metric that has more evidence, that we have higher confidence in, and at least one metric that we have less confidence in — and we can then use those results to start building confidence in those other metrics. So trying to see to what extent do these things correlate with each other.
And it’s all fuzzy; it’s kind of cloudy and never totally certain. But through this process of iterating and using these measurements in different species, in different contexts, and seeing the relationship between the measurements, we’re slowly getting a better and better idea of how to interpret these things.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s super cool. I think part of me has this worry that there are so many assumptions. And in some species, I can really get behind that cortisol really does probably mean the same thing, or a very similar thing, in chimps as it does in humans. Then the farther you get on the evolutionary tree of life from humans, I feel more worried and uncertain.
But I do just feel pretty good about a process that uses tonnes of different indicators. I’m sure that takes into account what we know about different species. For insects, there will probably have to be a different set of benchmarks, but we’ll be taking those into account. And by thinking carefully and having a very diverse set of indicators, I can just imagine being like, they’re in a situation that seems like it might be harmful to them: they have physiological markers of distress, they’ve got cortisol, they’ve got behaviours that seem like distress. And just like the whole picture is one where it gets really hard to imagine that all of those things are true and that that animal is not feeling stress.
Am I feeling too optimistic about this, or do you feel like that kind of optimism is justified?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think that optimism is justified, because what you were describing here, you’re optimistic about our ability to at least eventually understand questions about welfare by using metrics like these.
The thing that can be a bit discouraging is if you look at the state of the science right now, it’s nowhere near where we would like it to be. For example, you appropriately mentioned cortisol, one of these stress hormones, as that’s one of the most commonly used indicators of welfare. And we’ve actually found — through the research we’ve been doing on the usefulness and accuracy of these measures — that cortisol and other stress hormones are not nearly as useful as many people think they are.
So not worthless, but they seem to correlate most tightly with arousal rather than affect. So you’ll have a lot of cortisol in your system if you’re terrified and running from a predator; you’ll also have a lot of cortisol in your system if you’re goofing around and playing with your sibling, or if you are having sex. These are high-arousal activities, where your body triggers a lot of the same kinds of physiological mechanisms. This arousal-versus-valence framing is something that we use to evaluate metrics, because a lot of the physiological metrics do seem to be more closely related to arousal.
And again, it’s not that it gives you no information. A lot of the work we’re doing is trying to understand in what contexts would higher cortisol probably mean higher negative subjective experience, versus are you just picking up that the animals move around more?
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s fascinating. I am interested: you did say that none of these are perfect, but some do seem better. Can you talk about which seem like your favourite measures of something affective?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I don’t know about favourite overall, because the motto is always: check your species and your question, and different metrics are useful for different things. But Andrew Sharo is a researcher who’s been collaborating with us on this, and he gave a great presentation on this in which he categorised these indicators into the panda indicators and the beaver indicators — which is an ecology joke: pandas are seen by ecologists as totally overrated; there’s all this conservation money going to them, but they don’t actually have that big an effect on the ecosystem.
So Andrew Sharo at least said that among these panda indicators are the glucocorticoids which we just mentioned, combined body condition, even play. The Five Domains Model is a very common model for looking at different aspects of the animal’s environment or physical needs and trying to combine them, but it has its limitations.
But you asked about the best measures. Again, I don’t think it quite makes sense to say which measures are best, but we can at least say which measures are underrated, and our impression of how useful they can be in the literature so far. These are the beaver metrics: the ones that people don’t give enough credit to, but actually these medium-sized rodents can totally reengineer an ecosystem; they’re called ecosystem engineers for that reason. Eager by Ben Goldfarb is a great book on beavers for those who are curious.
So beaver metrics: qualitative behavioural assessments; preference testing; neurotransmitters; DNA methylation, which is another one of the genetic metrics I didn’t mention yet; the expression of specific genes; and then inflammation and oxidative stress — that’s a set of metrics or physiological indicators that broadly represent how quickly a cell is breaking down, and seems like it could be a fairly good indicator of the sorts of physiological stress that are most likely to correlate with emotional stress.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, those are super cool. I think my main reaction is like, I’ve heard of lots of those. I can imagine stories for why they tell us things about how well an animal is doing overall, and I feel reassured. I feel good about using some combination of those things to try to figure out which things are good and bad for wild animals.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I appreciate your comment there that you recognise a lot of those. If you studied biology, you know that these are things. We know how to do some biology.
And I should be better at it, because it is my full-time job, but I do struggle with talking about the state of wild animal welfare science. There’s so much more that we need to do, and so much we don’t understand, and questions we haven’t asked — but there’s also all these tools lying around, and so much that has already been done. So a lot of the cutting-edge work in wild animal welfare science is just taking things that have been used in other contexts and then asking, Do they work in this context? Or what assumptions are we making, and do those hold?
But there’s a lot to work with, and a lot of people who’ve been working really hard on these and closely related questions.
Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Let’s leave that there. Pushing on, we’ve already touched on this issue briefly, but I wanted to explore this tractability question — how much progress can we actually make on solving or addressing some of the suffering that happens in wild nature? — because it was a big issue for me, and my sense is that it’s still a big issue for other people.
To narrow that down, I think one of the biggest reasons it seems kind of intractable is because it feels like anything you tried to do to help a specific species face less predation or face starvation less would end up creating kind of unpredictable — and potentially actively harmful — flow-through effects. I’ve kind of given a rough outline of this, but do you mind giving a more concrete example of this worry?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think it’s a super important consideration to keep in mind, and it’s one of the reasons why we think it will be helpful to have wild animal welfare science as kind of a new research field: there are types of questions that come up when you ask about the interactions between species and the effect on each of their welfare that don’t come up as often as, say, if you were to focus solely on the conservation of a single species. So definitely important to consider, and can be quite complicated.
One example that comes to mind is research that has been showing links between the prevalence of Lyme disease in the American midwest and northeast and the local extinction of wolves in those regions.
So the chain goes something like this. This actually happened a while ago — in the 1600s, 1700s, maybe 1800s — for areas of the Midwest where wolves had been numerous, and then humans hunted them to extinction in those regions. Then in the early 20th century was when leash laws first became common in cities, and there were far fewer domestic dogs roaming the streets and farms. That made it possible for coyotes to expand their range from the Great Plains, where they’d been historically, into the northeast and midwest — and coyotes are now found throughout the nation.
And when the coyotes came along, they were eating things, but they were also defending territory against other predators. So they made life harder for red foxes, which were in the region. Red foxes are like wolves and coyotes, also canines, but they’re much smaller. So coyotes always win against red foxes, whereas coyotes always lose against grey wolves.
So with fewer red foxes, there ended up being more rodents, because rodents are a huge part of their diet. It’s part of coyotes’ diets, but coyotes are a bit more flexible. Red foxes, they’re doing a lot of pouncing on little things. They look like house cats, kind of, in the way they do it. And more rodents meant more hosts for deer ticks, which are the ticks that bear Lyme disease, which can be a very painful illness for humans.
So what we have there is an example of a cascade of interactions that involves both trophic relationships — food chain, who’s eating who relationships — but also some competitive or behavioural relationships.
Luisa Rodriguez: I thought you were going to give a simple example, like when there’s less predation, animals starve more because there are more of them. But that I feel like even convinces me more of this problem. I could not possibly have guessed anything like that. And it seems like it could really make a difference to the kinds of interventions you’d want to consider and how good or bad they were likely to be, so it seems like a problem.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So there are several strategies for avoiding or accounting for this problem. But I do think it is also useful to note that, while there are many examples of these cascading interactions, my sense is that the public thinks of ecosystems as more fragile than they actually are.
I think this somewhat reflects the thinking in ecology, although lags behind the cutting edge of academic understanding a little bit. Ecology used to have a model of the ecosystem as an organism where every single part was contributing perfectly to this whole, and if you took out any part, the whole would collapse.
The model now is now that ecosystems are a system of interacting components, some of which are more important than others. The analogy that’s often invoked is like a web. Interestingly, people often invoke the web analogy to suggest that ecosystems are fragile and any one piece will cause it to collapse. But I think they’re actually more like an actual spider web: there are some strands where if you pull those out, it will collapse, and there are a lot of strands where if you pull those out, they’ll get replaced by another strand.
And just to gut check this, I think it’s useful to think about how we actually see ecosystems manifesting on the landscape. That’s not as discrete chunks of things that work together in just the right way, but typically in gradients. So in southern Florida, you’re in a subtropical forest with palm trees; at the tip of Maine, you get these almost completely coniferous forests: very dense, very dark trees that don’t drop their leaves in the winter. And you get from one to the other, basically, by a very gradual shifting as you go with latitude, of different mixes of trees. And we’re using trees here as a proxy for the assemblages of species in those ecosystems.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. It still seems like, if you’re trying to implement an intervention to have predictable effects on the makeup of the species in that ecosystem, and the kinds of things that they’re going to predominantly experience or not experience anymore, I’m less worried about collapse and more worried about that other strand in the web that might do the replacing of a strand that maybe gets pulled out because we get rid of the ticks that carry Lyme disease or something. Maybe that other strand is a type of rodent that carries a different parasite, and that parasite actually causes much more suffering.
That seems like the kind of thing I worry most about. But do you think that that also is less of an issue than people might initially think in a similar way?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So I was just making the case that I think we should not panic about these interactions, and like you said, we’re not always on the brink of collapse.
That being said, I do think they’re important, and I think they’re especially important from a wild animal welfare perspective. Perhaps even more important than if you’re only considering, say, the benefits that ecosystems provide to humans or to certain species of conservation concern. Because if the change in population of one species dramatically alters the change of population in another species, that could have welfare effects on the community. And we care about the welfare of each of the animals in that community.
One of the ways that wild animal welfare interventions can try to minimise the risk of these problems is by finding problems that can be solved in ways that don’t change the population of the target species. If you have a stable population, then it’s less likely that you’ll initiate these trophic cascades.
One example of that that we’re really interested in is developing contraception for wildlife. We’ve been looking into rats specifically because they are frequently poisoned in cities and in agricultural contexts, and the poison is an anticoagulant that often takes days for the rodent to die by bleeding out, so it would be great if we could reduce this cause of death. Some companies have started developing potential products that could address this. We think they need a little more testing, but the technology is either there or close to there.
Anyway, you can also imagine using contraception for rodents in a wild context where they’re in a bottom-up limited situation — where, if you have a rodent population that’s limited by the amount of food available to them, then if you give them more food, they’re only going to grow to a larger population and then start competing for food again; they’re stuck in this Malthusian trap. But you could provide them with contraception, and if you got the rates just right, it’d be possible to keep the population the same, but reduce the rate of infant mortality.
Basically what we’re talking about here is a population on the whole that instead of having lots of babies being born and competing with each other for food and only a few of them making it out — a population that has a lot of churn, a lot of death per year in it — you can have a population that consists more of healthy adults. That’s the kind of strategy where we’re trying to fix a problem — in this case, starvation as a painful cause of death — and we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t modify the total size of the population.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense and is reassuring that we could plausibly do that. Does that mean that we are limited to interventions that keep populations stable, or can we do other things?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I definitely think there are other options available to us. Another approach is alternating between two different stable, predictable benchmarks. The idea here is you might have choices to establish or modify a habitat such that the altered version is one that exists elsewhere, and you already know how it works — and you’re pretty sure that if you have this assemblage of trees, you’re likely to end up with this assemblage of birds, that kind of thing.
So this is interesting because it’s operating at a much bigger scale. The first approach is more like, “Let’s make sure we’re limited to just this one thing.” This other approach is like, “If we take a big jump from here to here, at least we know where we land is another kind of thing that we generally know how it works.”
Luisa Rodriguez: How confident are you that these two approaches will actually work like that? I am such a non-expert, but I have this feeling that wild nature could still be so complicated that you’d plan really smart interventions that look like one of these, and still you’d get really unexpected effects and end up with something that looks worse than the original.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, and that’s why I think a really important part of any intervention, ideally, is to follow it up with monitoring — and, if necessary, mitigation. So you have a plan, you implement it — typically you initially implement it at a small scale — and then study that and scale it up gradually, and you try to see if things are going the way you thought they would go. You generally look at animal populations, at rates of different causes of death, and those kinds of things.
Basically, you try to be on guard for scenarios in which your plan ends up not being accurate or your predictions aren’t accurate. And once that’s the case, you try to take actions to mitigate the effects of that. So if you’re running a small pilot study, that might just mean stopping the study.
I would say this is also a case for preferring interventions that are more easily reversible. So entirely eliminating a species from a system, or introducing a species that was never there before that reproduces rapidly: those are pretty risky things to do. But doing something like administering contraception, you can just stop putting the drug out there. And it’s a drug that we already know, at least for the species we’ve studied, that it breaks down relatively quickly. If anything, that’s sort of a hurdle, where you need to make sure you’re continually administering it.
But it is the kind of thing that breaks down and does have a relatively short expiration date on it, and it would only be a matter of months until the effects kind of work through the system. And then it won’t necessarily have been the case that you will have done no harm, but you can try to detect it as quickly as possible and then adapt to it if you encounter it.
Luisa Rodriguez: Just to push back a bit: how confident are you that you’d be able to successfully implement interventions that actually will be reversible, and that actually you’ll be able to mitigate the consequences?
I feel like I can just easily think of so many examples where humans have tried to interfere in nature and it’s caused unexpected and problematic consequences for decades. One coming to mind is introducing rabbits or cane toads in Australia, both of which became invasive and destructive species there. Or the use of DDT to control malaria-spreading mosquitoes and agricultural pests, which I think then caused sharp declines in bird populations like bald eagles.
These examples, to me, just really give me a strong sense of how interfering can go really wrong. And I don’t have the sense that whoever introduced rabbits to Australia… Could they have predicted how wrong that would have gone? Could you have? If that were you now, was that knowable?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think there are a couple of really important differences between whatever they might have predicted then and what we might be able to predict now. One, they often weren’t trying to make predictions about wild animal welfare or even ecosystems. My understanding is that cane toads were introduced to Australia to eat agricultural pests. And as far as I know, they did that job. As far as I know, not a lot of questions were asked about what other jobs they might take up once they were there. So that’s part of it. I think that we shouldn’t over-index on cases where no one tried to avoid negative effects.
And then another important consideration is that we’ve learned from a lot of those experiences — which is not to say that they are easy to predict or will never happen again. But taking your example of DDT and the terrible consequences it had for populations of birds of prey, I don’t think even scientists had widespread understanding of the concept of biomagnification at that point, and that’s a really important part of what happened there.
So the pesticides washed off the fields and ran into rivers. Then fish living in those rivers accumulated those pesticides in their bodies. And then the birds of prey eating those fish accumulated the pesticides from the fish that they were eating. It wasn’t just that you get as much pesticide as the fish you ate that day; it’s that if you eat these fish day after day after day, certain kinds of chemicals like DDT will attach to tissues in the body and will not be broken down and will accumulate over time, causing much more intense toxicity than you would have lower on the food chain.
So I don’t think biomagnification was understood, or at least not widely written about before Rachel Carson published her book, Silent Spring, in 1962, on this very issue. And now we have a whole new sort of category of ways things can go wrong, and questions we would ask before putting something out there.
So I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if we continue doing research, both at the theoretical level — How do ecosystems work? What sorts of things are likely to have what sorts of indirect effects? — and then also at the practical level — Is this intervention a good idea? — I really think we’re going to come up with plenty of things that would be helpful to plenty of animals.
Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. We’ve already covered a few interventions that you think could be robustly good, but I’d be very excited to learn about some more. What is an intervention to improve wild animal welfare that you’re excited about that we haven’t covered yet?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Well, in talking about the problem of wild animal welfare, I’ve made a few allusions to the progress that we’ve made in human poverty and public health over recent decades and centuries. I think there’s probably a whole class of interventions that’s like, “Look at what’s cost effective in public health, and see if we can translate that to wild contexts.”
Vaccinations look like one area that could be pretty tractable in that respect. There have already been wild animal vaccination programmes that have been developed for the purpose of protecting humans or livestock from diseases spread by animals. So Finland, for example, had a programme vaccinating foxes and raccoon dogs against rabies using bait. So it’s an oral vaccine, something they eat, that I believe is just dropped out of helicopters or aeroplanes en masse. When we think of vaccines, we think of people lining up in an orderly line and getting one shot at a time. But fortunately we wouldn’t have to do that with wild animals: it looks like there’s a way to sort of scatter it across the landscape.
And we would love to do more ecologically informed, intensive followup than I think the Finnish government did, but at least we didn’t see collapse or any terribly disastrous consequences in that case. So I think vaccinations, especially against extremely painful diseases like rabies, that are caused by viruses or pathogens and not by parasites that might be sentient, that seems like a really tractable direction to head in.
Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that just seems straightforwardly good. Are there risks or ways that could backfire, or is that just clearly worth doing?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think it’s still something that has some ways it could backfire. Before we did that at large scales, the first thing I’d want to check is how does that affect the overall populations of the animals being vaccinated? Are their populations rising because there’s lower mortality rates? And if so, is that having effects on other populations?
Or is their death being mostly or entirely compensated by some other cause of death? Are they now getting hit by cars more often? And the nice thing about working with something like rabies is I’m pretty sure that most causes of death are not nearly as bad as rabies, so swapping those out is fine. But I would want to see if we were avoiding trophic cascades.
And then of course there’s the concern about direct effects on non-target species: other animals besides the ones with rabies might be eating those baits and having health effects. So I would want to double check that that wasn’t causing harm at large scales.
But it seems like the kind of thing where the problems are relatively predictable, and it’s a relatively short list of things. And given that it has been tried before, we think that there aren’t going to be a whole bunch of things that jump out, like not a whole tonne of unknown unknowns. So again, the kind of thing that you need to do your homework for, but seems totally possible to do so in the relatively near term.
Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Do you have any concrete predictions about what the flow-through effects might be if there weren’t kind of one-for-one replacement of rabies deaths with other deaths?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So let’s focus on foxes. They have a diet that consists primarily of small animals: rodents, and also snakes and frogs, things like that. They are omnivorous. They also eat berries and plants.
So the first thing I would wonder is: Are we having a larger fox population? Does that mean a smaller, let’s say, rodent population? And because these are predators, that means that they eat a lot of animals just to support their own body weight. And because they’re eating particularly small animals, that does mean it’s a relatively large population that could be affected here. So if we thought that rodents were typically living net-positive lives, then having fewer of them around might be a bad thing for the animal community on the whole.
Luisa Rodriguez: Oh god, that’s so incredibly thorny. Is that the way that this is most likely to end up being net negative? Or what is the most likely way that you think this could end up being net negative?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I do think that’s my guess for what’s most likely: If you change the population size of one species, how does that affect the population size of another species, either through predation or competition or other sorts of interactions?
But I will note that there are a couple ways around this, as we discussed before. One, you could use something like contraception to mitigate the effects. So their decreased mortality rate, but also decreased fertility rate, keeps a population the same size. You might look into this and decide that the math just works out and this is good on net.
I also think there’s something to be said for doing interventions that have a clear positive effect and represent the kinds of interventions that we would want to do in the long run, but might or might not have a net-positive effect right now, or we might be uncertain about it. Because remember, that’s the status quo for every other thing anyone ever does in the world: do something good that helps someone, and who knows how it affects wild animals?
Luisa Rodriguez: Totally.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So at least improving the tools we have available to help wild animals and the knowledge we have about what kinds of things have what kinds of effects, I think it’s reasonable to take steps forward even if we think there will be some casualties in the short term. I think that’s reasonable. I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, and would want to have a sense of what kinds of tradeoffs we’re making here. I also think it’s something that different value systems might differ on and different communities might differ on. So a longer conversation, but I think something that should be on the table.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of what I think is called something like the poor meat-eater problem, where there are a bunch of global health and poverty interventions that I feel pretty great about implementing, that end up lifting people out of poverty and extending lifespan in a way that might mean that more communities can consume animal products, and especially can consume animal products produced in factory farms.
And that seems really terrible, but I at least put some weight on a value system that says do it anyways: keep working on global health and development, and then also figure out how to make sure that the factory farm conditions improve. And if we can, factory farms that are built in emerging markets are less terrible than the ones that have been built historically. Does that feel analogous to you?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: That is exactly it, yeah. I have struggled with the poor meat-eater problem myself in the past, and come to the same kind of conclusion. I think it’s the same kind of theory of change that it seems like the right direction to head in; it’s probably more important to head in the right direction than it is to do everything in the exact right order or has suffered no tradeoffs along the way.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I want to make sure that I really stand by this. It sounds like you’ve struggled with this before, and I’m happy to either talk about it with regards to the poor meat-eater problem or in the case of rabies and similar things. What makes you feel however confident you do that heading in the right direction is more important than not worrying a bunch about the suffering caused in the interim?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So I’ll start with the poor meat-eater problem specifically, and then try to make the analogy. Big asterisk here: I don’t totally trust my reasoning here, because it’s obviously very motivated. I would really like to not have to take the position that we have to let more people living in poverty die.
But it seems to me like when we’re talking about the treatment of animals, that seems like something where the idea of the expanding moral circle is pretty relevant. Where historically, people have treated animals horribly, and factory farming has been this technological invention of a new way to treat animals horribly. But overall, it seems like increasing wealth and increasing urbanisation pretty reliably results in more compassionate attitudes towards animals. Maybe because it’s less of a material us-versus-them, or “of course we have to eat them” or whatever.
So being vegan, the reason it’s a discussion at all in the social circles I live in is because it’s so fricking easy relative to the scale of the problem. When I am at this grocery store that is just overflowing with the abundance of all the food that globalisation can create, should I buy chicken or should I buy chickpeas? Versus if you are living in a rural community where chicken is your primary protein source and your corn crop didn’t do well enough to feed just the chickens that year, are you going to start switching to chickpeas? That might not be possible.
Anyway, all that is to say, in that case, I feel moderately confident about the claim that it’s actually necessary to raise incomes before that society will be able to prioritise animal welfare.
Does that translate to the fox and rabies example? Not precisely. But I think the loose analogy here is it seems like it would be hard to build up a society that cares about wild animal welfare and devotes resources to it and writes policy in a way that accounts for wild animal welfare if we don’t take any steps in that direction until we know all the answers. It seems like that’s going to be a long process itself, the social side of implementing the science. So I think it makes sense to get those gears turning as soon as we can, give people some opportunities for policies to enact.
And then there’s also these interactive effects, where implementing the interventions feeds back into the science, because it gives us more of an idea of what kinds of problems happen when you try to do these things, and are we asking the right questions and are there gaps in our understanding? So I think that interactive effect is actually probably the best justification for being willing to take some interventions on, even if we think they might not have robustly net-positive consequences in the short term.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I was ready to be like, I don’t know. It feels like there is an important disanalogy, where in the so-called poor meat-eater problem, prosperity does seem really instrumentally valuable for people being more compassionate toward animals, which seems less true in the wild animal suffering case.
But if you just think of it as field building — building this field scientifically, and building it as a public who’s willing and excited about these interventions — just seeing some carried out, and then learning from them, and then gathering support for them, and then gathering support for the next one after that does seem like probably the most realistic picture about how this goes forward.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. I guess the one subtlety I do consider is that I think this argument is strongest for interventions that are either using technologies that we think we’re likely to use for a long time or in many different contexts, or are somehow informing our understanding of ecological dynamics, the understanding of which will be broadly useful. I think the more that an intervention is kind of a one-and-done thing, or the less globally generalisable it is, the less strong this argument is.
For example, ocean fishing, the capture of wild fish, involves a huge number of animals, a huge amount of suffering in the take of those fish. I think that there have been a few efforts, really quite small scale still, but a few efforts to make that more humane — such as by designing ships where you can bring a bunch of fish on board and then electrocute them in a pool of water and kill them close to instantly.
Hard to know if that would scale. But that kind of thing, I don’t know if that’s going to feed into other kinds of things. I haven’t thought about it super long. Maybe electrocution killing is more relevant in other wild contexts than I have thought. But because it seems specific to the fishing industry, I don’t really know where else you would apply it. I would want to just be more sure that that has a net-positive effect.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. Is there another intervention that right now you’d be excited to implement?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Again with the caveat of not quite right now, but right now I’d be very excited to start evaluating whether this is as good as it seems at first glance. But one that I’m interested in is fire management in fire prone areas. And this is an interesting example too, because it seems to align quite well with human interests.
Luisa Rodriguez: Totally.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: If we think about the American west, for example, that’s a landscape where historically, at least probably since the last ice age, there have been regularly lots of wildfires caused by a combination of lightning and a lot caused by humans over the last thousands of years. Those wildfires regularly burned down the amount of fuel that was available in a forest, and it would happen frequently, but not at a large scale.
Now we’ve transitioned to a state where we are not regularly starting fires intentionally and we’re frequently fighting fires. So the fuel builds up, and then when a wildfire does happen, it can be disastrous and burn whole swaths of estate and cause destruction of many homes, et cetera. So that’s the human interest. And it would be great to have more intentional fire management, prescribed burns, more frequently that would burn smaller amounts at a time in a more controlled way.
It also looks like this is probably a pretty good way of reducing the amount of wild animal deaths that would occur from wildfires, because if you’re working with a fire that is a prescribed burn, it’s burning much more slowly and a much smaller area, so animals have a much better chance of escaping those flames. Because burning alive seems likely to be one of the worst ways to die, it seems likely that replacing that with other forms of death is probably better for wild animals.
Approaching fire management in a way that reduces the number of animals that die from fire seems like something where it might be able to help animals at a pretty large scale. And one thing I like about this is that it helps large animals, but it’s particularly helpful to small animals, which are more numerous and have a harder time getting away from fire. Meadow voles and grasshoppers and snakes, they all stand a chance of getting away from a small fire, but not from a huge raging one.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. Is there a reason we’re not doing this more already?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I’m sure there are a bunch of reasons. I’m sure I don’t know them. My rough impression is that wildfire management is just an incredibly mostly politically complicated thing in terms of who’s willing to take those risks and then also who’s willing to invest those resources. Kind of like you have with many kinds of disaster preparedness, investing the resources ahead of time is the best way to prevent it, but is the harder political pitch to make.
So it is very complicated, and all the fire ecologists I know feel quite frustrated at the state of things. So this will take more than just the wild animal advocacy to solve. But I think this is just one more reason to do it. And once we do start doing it, it might affect how we do it exactly — like what the guidelines are about how frequently, or what size burns, or what habitats you prioritise doing them in. That kind of thing.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I feel excited about that. One idea that came up in an interview we did with Kevin Esvelt was using CRISPR gene drive technology to eradicate screwworm, which is, if I’m remembering correctly, a parasitic larva that eats animals, especially cattle, from the inside out. And it sounds like truly horrible, horrible torture. What do you think about this idea?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I’m quite excited by the idea. So a few more details for those who aren’t squirming yet: it’s a fly that lays its eggs on the open external wounds of mammals — at least mammals, maybe also others — and then the eggs, once they hatch, they immediately burrow into the flesh and eat the necrotic flesh around the wound. They’re called screwworms because they physically have a literal screw-like shape. So they’re born and then they just start wriggling and screwing into the flesh, and it can be extremely painful.
It seems really terrible, and terrible enough that it has caused enough physical damage to livestock to be a problem for the livestock industry. It used to be a problem for humans as well when we had less good sanitation.
No one has studied the effects on wild animal welfare that I know of. But I think it’s quite likely that many more wild animals are affected by screwworms than livestock by virtue of this thing we keep bumping into, which is that livestock are really big, it takes a lot of resources to support them, and in any given environment you’re likely to find many more small animals than big animals.
So we’re not sure exactly, but this is actually a project that we have been considering taking on in the near term: looking a little bit into the empirical questions of what other species are affected by this, and then modelling how big was the effect of the eradication of the screwworm from North America. It seems like it could be quite promising. Again, we run into the questions of what are the indirect effects on other species, but a pretty good candidate, I think, for a highly cost-effective, large-scale intervention.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK, cool. Do you have a take on CRISPR in particular? Using gene drives to actually make them sterile? Does that seem like the right approach, or are you excited about another one?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think that has a lot of potential. To take a step back, the history of this is that New World screwworm used to be prevalent throughout North America. There was a multinational effort to eradicate it, and it has now been functionally eradicated everywhere north of Panama. And that effort did not use gene drives at all. It didn’t use any sophisticated genetic technologies. It used radiation to radiate a bunch of male flies, then released them in the wild. So these were just like flies who had gotten nuked, they’d just been fried a little bit so that they were sterile.
Luisa Rodriguez: Whoa, that’s fascinating!
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So really primitive stuff, technologically speaking.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And maybe terrible for them?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Maybe terrible. I don’t know the details. It was something about the frequency of the radiation was sufficient to render the males sterile, but not inactive — because the crucial part is that they then go out into the environment and unsuccessfully try to mate with a bunch of females, and then sort of clog up the breeding pool there.
Anyway, it’s possible to do that without gene drives, and insofar as gene drives are not appealing, or become a problem, or take a while to develop, we don’t have to wait on gene drives to scale up screwworm eradication, to extend that to other regions.
That being said, I think that gene drives are quite exciting. The hesitation in my voice only comes from the fact that I’m worried about getting too excited about them. In theory, CRISPR and the use of gene drives and daisy chains — which are a kind of gene drive that limits the extent of the gene drive, so that you can implement a change in the gene pool and then it’ll kind of wear out after a few generations — all of this could open up so many ways to help wild animals be immune to diseases or who knows what.
So that’s a really exciting door that opens up a lot of science fiction. And I just think we need to be very careful strategically about how we open that door. People have been very resistant to the development of genetic technologies in the past. Genetically engineered foods, for example: there’s tonnes of science showing that they’re safe, but because of the reckless and pretty evil actions of Monsanto and other companies when they were first developing these technologies, they got a reputation as something that couldn’t be trusted.
So given the potential of gene drives, I just think it’s useful as a movement to move as slowly and strategically as possible in terms of developing them technologically, but also, from a social and regulatory standpoint, making sure that this remains an option. And that likely looks like initial use of gene drives in the wild being focused on something that is clearly beneficial to humans, like the eradication of malaria, and then only moving from there to things that are optimised for wild animal welfare.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK, I see. That all sounds reasonable and wise. OK, let’s talk about other common objections you hear.
One is that “nature is good.” In other words, the natural world and natural and wild places are special and important. And even though the circle of life is violent and brutal and might cause some animals to suffer sometimes, it’s also special, and we should preserve and protect that specialness. Do you have a reaction to that?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think the claim that nature is good often has bundled together in it some empirical assumptions and some normative claims. So the empirical assumptions are things we’ve been talking about, about the actual facts of the matter: How much are animals suffering in these circumstances? Is that outweighed by other experiences in their life?
And then the normative claim, which I think is really what you’re trying to get at here, is: Is there some other thing that we should be valuing, other than just the experience of the individuals? Obviously, this is an area where different ethical systems can diverge.
If you’re more consequentialist, I think this would be less persuasive. Many forms of deontology would be more interested in these kinds of arguments.
But I think for all of those systems, you would at least need a way to explain why we’re treating animals differently than we treat humans. And normally, “nature is good” is not a sufficient reason for letting children die of malaria, or letting people’s homes be burned in wildfire, or any number of totally naturally occurring harms that humans have spent centuries insulating ourselves from.
So I think just in practice, most people, even if they hold this belief in some circumstances, are actually applying a double standard — and a more fair, and more compassionate, more ethical approach would acknowledge that even if there is some value to naturalness itself, it’s probably not worth imposing or allowing for extreme suffering.
Luisa Rodriguez: Just to quickly define those terms, consequentialism is the philosophical orientation that says you should evaluate the morality of actions based on their outcomes, whereas deontology says an action is good or bad based on whether you’ve followed the right moral rules or duties, regardless of the consequences.
But yeah, I can really easily get in touch with this feeling. Like I imagine watching Planet Earth and Blue Planet, and I can picture the polar bears and the parrots, and I’m like, “It is really cool that basically no humans have entered parts of the Amazon, and that those things arose naturally, and they go about their business and they’re so diverse and so magical and so special” — and I feel a real pull toward that.
But I think the thing that you’ve said is just true for me. Like that is a reason; it’s just not a good enough reason to accept the kinds of experiences that we think these animals might be having. So maybe there’s something about accepting it as a real value, but just being like it’s not a value that trumps other ones — like, “make sure that there aren’t trillions of beings having terrible experiences on the regular.”
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. It’s totally fair for those values to be on the table. My suspicion is that lots of times people are just not giving enough weight to these other values, which are the experiences of the wild animals themselves.
And I also think there’s some interesting things to dig into on that point about the value of totally undisturbed nature. I also really treasure that. Some things to pull apart there.
One, there’s a value there, which is me enjoying that. That is a real welfare thing. Put that on the scales. But the animals living there might feel differently. Like, I find it very interesting to go into extremely poor neighbourhoods in other countries and see what that world is like. But I have some sense that these are slums and I shouldn’t just celebrate these unabashedly. There are tradeoffs here. It’s interesting for me, but I would prefer people not live in slums.
And then there’s also the idea of undisturbed nature itself, which is just historically inaccurate for most places on Earth — unless you want to really wind back the clock tens of thousands of years, which you might. But it just is the case that many of the animals and environments that we know today have lived in the presence of humans for a long time.
Humans, as they spread across the Earth when they migrated out of Africa for the first permanent time, caused a lot of extinctions of megafauna — large animals that used to live on other continents. The reason that Africa still has so much megafauna is in large part because elephants and Cape buffalo and zebras and giraffes evolved in the presence of humans and learned to be afraid of naked little monkeys. So there’s a human part to elephants: there is a knowledge of humans in their instincts.
That’s an old example. A newer example is in North America. When the European colonists first came to Massachusetts, they were amazed at these park-like woodlands where you could just ride your horse through them. They were filled with sunlight because there was almost no underbrush: it was just big trees, lots of sunlight, strawberries growing on the ground.
That’s because the American Indians of the region were actively managing that land and prescribing burns every few years to keep the forests open, to maximise the amount of rabbit and deer and turkey that could live on the land, to maximise their own ability to hunt those animals. Something like that had probably been going since the retreat of the glaciers, about 10,000 years ago. There’s just no version of, in this case, northeast woodland American nature that didn’t have humans in it. I also like getting away from humans, but I think this idea of nature as a sort of default without humans, I think that’s just not the case in many places.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I basically feel at least very pulled in that direction, sympathetic. I guess it seems like there’s a difference between humans doing our human things, which has some consequences for nonhuman animals in the wild, and then very deliberately trying to meddle with the experiences of wild animals in potentially quite extreme, deliberate, calculated ways.
Some feelings I have about that are like, one, who are we to say what’s best for animals? I barely know what’s going on for my dog when she looks at me, let alone what’s going on for a frog when she climbs up a tree with the babies on her back.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, I think that question is the answer: Who are we to say what’s best for animals? I don’t think we should be making up answers willy-nilly. I think we should be trying really, really hard to ask animals and understand their answers. And that means doing a lot more research than we’ve done, that means developing new ways of asking these questions, of understanding animals’ preferences and what things cause them stress or joy.
That is the whole project of wild animal welfare science. The goal is not to just arbitrarily meddle in nature, but the goal is to, as much as possible, try to figure out — in an evidence-based way — if animals could ask things of us, what would they ask for? And then try to act on our best guesses as the answers to those questions.
Like you said, that’s the kind of thing that we choose to do for our dogs and for our children before they learn to speak. We have some experience caring for sentient beings who can’t speak to us directly, but have other ways of expressing their emotions, and we have other ways of interpreting those. I think it’s just a matter of expanding that out to more and more species.
Luisa Rodriguez: I’m kind of getting an image of, if I were to be near really any wild animal, and that wild animal were a regular part of my life, I think I’d basically get a sense of them as a person, and very much want to try to make sure that they had a better life than a worse one, in the same way I do for my dog. If I just picture the deer in the meadow outside our house, I’m like, yeah, I would care about them too.
And yeah, we’re probably doing some very dehumanising/depersonising mental gymnastics when we’re like, “We shouldn’t bother meddling,” when we’re like, “I would like to meddle in my dogs’ and cats’ lives to make sure that they’re regularly fed and warm.”
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Exactly.
Luisa Rodriguez: So we had Peter Godfrey-Smith on the podcast recently. He spends a significant amount of time near and around wild animals in wild nature. And his perspective is that humans don’t tend to think of all of their negative experiences as terrible or purely bad. We tend to think of our experiences as maybe bad in the moment, but contributing to this rich life history that we then interpret and kind of reframe, but potentially in a very real way, as what life is about — and the negative experiences contribute often in different ways, but as much as the positive ones do.
And just in general, he sees birds making nests and having their eggs hatch, and he feels like people who are worried about wild animal suffering might be totally ignoring the richness and all the triumphs that wild animals are having because they have a mix of good and bad experiences.
And I think it’s fair that I wouldn’t necessarily eliminate all of my negative experiences if I could snap my fingers.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I listened to that episode, and I might have missed something about his argument, but as far as I could understand it, it seemed like he was asking for more wild animal welfare science. It seemed like he was doing the thing that I’m saying we should do, which is ask these questions.
Luisa Rodriguez: It’s true that that was his, I think, bottom line.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, it sounded to me like a hypothesis about empirical facts, like what might actually be the balance of things that are valuable to a certain kind of parrot in this case.
And one of the reasons that we at Wild Animal Initiative take this approach of trying to support the growth of an academic field, a research community, rather than just having a few groups figuring stuff out, is that we want there to be the institutional and intellectual infrastructure to continue to bring in people with different perspectives who can challenge whatever the existing dogma is. Because understanding other minds is really difficult, and I think will be a long-term project.
And I think he’s right that lots of the characterisations or hypotheses that have been put out there so far do make relatively simplistic guesses about the balance of negative and positive experiences, especially over time. But I think that’s another question that we could be asking, and we could be getting at least rough answers to or making our best guesses — again, all toward the goal of making our best guess as to what the animals want for themselves.
And to simply say those questions are too complicated; let’s maintain the status quo, or let’s wind the clock back to 1492, or whatever it is you’re doing, I just think that is making all the assumptions you could possibly make about what’s good for wild animals. I think that involves almost no asking them. And I’m just really curious about questions like that: Do moments of triumph outweigh many moments of struggling for these parrots? I don’t know. I would like to know.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny to me, because clearly it’s an open question in human philosophy and philosophy of the good life. And it seems like he would in fact be open to just, wild animals deserve us philosophising about what makes for a good life for them too.
What about something along the lines of, if you take wild animal welfare seriously, you might end up concluding that you need to do something really extreme — and potentially, for some people, morally unjustifiable in its own right — like kill all big predators, or keep all big predators apart from their prey animals? Which, for some people, would be a very obviously bad outcome, and that leading to very bad outcomes should make us suspicious of the whole endeavour.
Another example of this is like, maybe one could conclude that there is so much wild animal suffering in nature that just having way less wild animals alive would be the best solution.
And yeah, part of me has a strong gut reaction that is like, if the solution here is finding ways to eliminate wild nature by creating other kinds of places that are less wild and less hospitable to wild animals, then I feel suspicious of that as a goal and then as a field that has that goal. How do you orient to this kind of argument?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: First, just for background, there might be some listeners for whom the idea of killing all predators or destroying habitat might just be a totally new idea. To your credit, you did not make up those crazy ideas on the spot. These are things that have been discussed a lot, particularly by the philosophers who’ve written about this idea, and who I think really deserve credit for drawing a lot of attention to it.
But a big part of the reason that Wild Animal Initiative focuses on the natural science side of things is that we think that the lack of empirical understanding of wild systems and what we might be able to do to support wild animals is actually limiting our ability to imagine what solutions might look like. I think we just need to push ourselves to be more imaginative as to how you might solve problems without just eradicating the entire populace who’s suffering from the problem. That is not on the table for human poverty at all — for good reason, I think.
That would be my first response: that just because you could take it to places that seem extreme doesn’t mean that that necessarily is the direction it’s going.
Luisa Rodriguez: That makes sense. Was there another reason there?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. Another thing that I think is really important to think about is the ways that entertaining these extreme ideas affect the pursuit of the project itself. Part of this is epistemic, and part of it is movement building.
The epistemic argument is laid out really well in a paper by Tyler John and Jeff Sebo in 2019, “Consequentialism and nonhuman animals.” They call this “the logic of the logger,” this idea that the best thing we can do is just destroy nature. They say even if that ends up being true, given what we know about how people deal with cognitive dissonance, it’s hard to imagine building a society that really takes wild animal welfare seriously while the whole time committing to just destroying them.
Again, not that it’s impossible, but it just seems like a really hard pathway to get there. So we should be quite resistant to approaches to wild animal welfare that are more likely to cause us to disregard wild animals in the pursuit of it.
Then the final consideration I’ll speak to here is what I’m calling the movement-building consideration, which is that, even if it ends up being the case that the only way or the best way we can improve wild animal welfare is with measures that are so extreme that they seem to obviously violate our values, judged from our current perspective, we still just cannot get to that point, practically, empirically: there’s just no way you could know that without enlisting the help of conservation biologists and ecologists and animal behaviour scientists — a huge set of people who are currently deeply committed to protecting wild animals and preserving habitat.
So, given that this topic is basically a nonstarter for the experts you’d need to test that hypothesis, I think we should be really reluctant to bring it up too much or to emphasise it. And I’m not proposing a Trojan horse here; I’m just saying this is just not the interesting thing to talk about in the next few years or decades.
Luisa Rodriguez: OK. If, in three to five decades, we’ve been able to learn with confidence that there is enormous amounts of suffering in the wild, and none of the interventions that we’ve been able to identify and test will reliably address all of that suffering, at that point, would you be advocating for somehow unwilding places? I guess the classic image I have for this is paving over the Amazon and putting up a parking lot.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Thank you for being so generous with letting me skip around the thought experiment and talk about practical considerations.
But if I’m going to really engage with this as a thought experiment, and I’m going to accept the premises that we’ve gotten to this place and we’re confident in this conclusion — then, at least within my value system, yes, that is a choice I would want to make. Because I don’t value things other than individuals’ happiness or suffering so much so that I would allow for the continuation of large amounts of suffering just for the preservation of beauty or naturalness or diversity.
Now, someone might, that might be your value set — but if it is, I would say you have a pretty cruel set of beliefs, and I’m guessing that you might not apply those in other areas.
And I’ll note that in the context of factory farming, for example — it’s a little easier there, because we’re not dealing with a natural system — but many people advocate for veganism or other ways to lead to the abolition of factory farming. The basic premise there is that it would be better for these animals if they were never brought into such a torturous existence. So this is not an idea that is totally novel: this is a choice some people have made for other sets of animals; it’s a choice people often make for their pets at the end of their pets’ lives; it’s a choice that many individual humans make for themselves at the end of their lives, where they decide the suffering is going to outweigh the happiness, and they want to die sooner.
So if we’re really in the scenario that you pose with the thought experiment, then in that scenario, the animals are effectively wanting to not have to undergo all this suffering that happens when they’re brought into existence. And so in this scenario, the compassionate thing to do would be to put our reluctance aside and meet their needs by preventing them from coming into existence. And you might have values other than compassion, but at least that’s where the compassion values would point to.
Luisa Rodriguez: I find that really, really compelling. I do think I put you in a tough spot by asking you to answer about a thought experiment that is quite extreme. But I think that’s probably just the most humane possible answer you could give.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I will say that while that thought experiment presents the most extreme form, I can imagine in the relative near term coming upon what you might call reduced versions of that thought experiment.
When I said earlier that one wild animal welfare intervention might be to preferentially plant some kinds of forests instead of others, that’s essentially making a decision about what kinds of lives you’re trying to bring into existence through your forest management policy. And this is something that humans are already having a huge effect on without trying to consider wild animal welfare. But one of the things that does make wild animal welfare so tricky is that there very often are real tradeoffs between different species, and between even just the juveniles and the adults of the same species.
So I think it’s reasonable that we would have to consider this idea of whether animals are living net-negative lives, and what sorts of actions we might take to do that. I just don’t think we’re anywhere close to having to consider the most extreme end of that spectrum.
Luisa Rodriguez: That feels extremely compelling to me, and I’m already finding myself being like, yeah, I guess that is one side of a spectrum, and somewhere on that spectrum is something like “choose an ecosystem that has significantly less wildlife than another one because we know that the species that are really natural to that area happen to suffer from parasites with horribly, horribly disfiguring or painful or something symptoms.” So yeah, I think you’ve just basically got me pretty convinced and sold.
Are there any other objections that you hear regularly that we should cover before we move on?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: One objection I hear from other animal advocates in particular is not so much an objection based on principle, but more a movement strategy question of, like, how can we possibly undertake this huge, complicated, thorny set of issues when there are things right in front of us that we know how to solve? Like we could really possibly end factory farming within our lifetimes, so shouldn’t we just solve the problems that we caused first?
And I don’t know the total answer to that, but I think at least important parts of the answer are, one, I don’t think it matters to the animals whether we caused the problem or not. I think what matters to them is what their experiences are and can they have a better life. So I think we need to focus on the animal experience.
Two, I do think it is the case that for problems that humans are actively causing, it’s often easier to change or prevent those than problems that are existing in nature. So there is a real cost-effectiveness argument that I think should be considered there.
But then finally, I think that the idea that you can pursue problems sequentially just is inaccurate, and that actually the practice of ending factory farming will have huge impacts on wild animals.
One of the main reasons that you would want to have a society that eats way less meat or no meat at all is that it’s an extremely energy-inefficient way to produce food. If you’re higher up on the food chain, you need more total land to support yourself. So huge swaths of the world are dedicated to the production of feed crops, which are then fed to animals, which are then fed to humans. So there’s an environmental argument that not producing so much meat would mean that we wouldn’t have to waste so much land on feed crops.
But then there’s a question of what would become of that land if it’s not being used for feed crop production. And there’s a pivot point that’s introduced there: in theory, I suppose you could wait until you solve all the other problems and then get to this problem. But in solving the other problems, you might have accidentally made this problem way worse, and you might have lost an opportunity to set up ecosystems that are more likely to have more animal flourishing, as those ecosystems are changing anyway due to human action.
So that’s why I don’t know exactly what the right distribution of effort and resources is, but I do think we need to do at least enough of our homework on wild animal welfare that we’ll be prepared for this real hinge moment of land management post factory farming.
Luisa Rodriguez: I hadn’t considered that at all, and I find that really persuasive. Is there more to say on the way factory farming as a problem area interacts with wild animal welfare?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: The other main interaction I see is just that I also wouldn’t advocate for focusing purely on wild animal welfare just because the problem is so huge. I think that we need to think strategically about not just the in-the-field practicalities, but also the social movement aspects.
And it’s hard for me to imagine a society that really takes wild animal welfare seriously and devotes huge amounts of resources to improving the welfare of wild animals, while simultaneously tolerating the torture of so many animals in factory farms. So I think that the ending of factory farming is probably a necessary part of taking society in a direction where people take animals’ interests more seriously, and act on that understanding.
Luisa Rodriguez: Makes sense. I’m glad we talked about that, because I had originally written a question asking about like, “Is this just not our problem because we didn’t cause it?” And I personally find that just so uncompelling. Like, we didn’t make malaria, but obviously we still want to solve it. But yeah, that seems really important, so thanks for bringing it up.
Are there any interventions that we won’t be able to implement anytime soon, but that you’ve kind of heard or brainstormed, that you can imagine getting really excited about in the future when we learn more? I don’t know, maybe something like new science being developed, or new technologies that could really change the tools you have?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I’m really glad you asked about things that aren’t possible yet, because I am quite confident that the vast majority of the things we will do that will benefit wild animals are things that we can’t quite imagine right now. We’re just so early days in our understanding of the science and our development of the technology.
I think it’s something akin to someone in mediaeval Europe understanding the problems of speciesism. And then not only they might struggle to conceive of veganism — because much of that terrain is just so limiting in terms of what you can possibly grow that could support humans — but they definitely couldn’t imagine plant-based meat and definitely not cultivated meat. But these might end up being huge parts of the solution to animal farming.
So I try to remind myself that I’m not entitled to all the answers here, that I might not be able to imagine them. And that’s mostly a good thing. I think there are almost certainly more possibilities than we can imagine.
That being said, there are a couple things I use to hold that space in my imagination. Gene drives is one of them, as you mentioned, because these are things where in theory it seems like we could precisely alter the genes of wild animals and then have those spread through populations. And there’s all sorts of things that might be possible through there. The ones I can imagine right now are mostly related to disease resistance or perhaps ability to tolerate other potentially painful experiences, or knowledge to avoid them, or who knows what. So that’s one door to many futures.
And then another thing I think about is not at all a suggestion for a direction to look for cost-effective, scalable interventions, but just a reminder of how weird nature is. There’s a story I really love that came to me through Robert Sapolsky, who’s a primatologist, and he and some other researchers followed this one troop of baboons. And this troop came into contact with another troop of baboons. This other troop, unlike the baboons that had been living out in the savannah in sort of ancestrally representative ways, these baboons were just squatting on a garbage dump that I believe was near a tourist lodge or something. They’re just sitting there, and they just had all the food they could ever want. It was just the best. So cool.
So the invading troop correctly assessed this to be the way to live and a great source of food. And so, as baboons do, they went to war. Baboons are social species, like humans. They’re a much more patriarchal and sexually dimorphic species, in which the males have huge canines they use for intimidation and fighting. So there’s this very clear class division, where all the adult males went to fight the other troop. And I believe they did successfully drive them out of the trash dump.
The problem was, it turned out that the baboons of the trash dump had a disease. I think it was [bovine tuberculosis]. So shortly after the invading troop got access to this bounty of food, their males all fell ill and died because they had been swapping fluids with these infected males of this other troop, and they all got [bovine tuberculosis] and died. What was left was a troop of baboons that was only mothers and other adult females and children.
And so the next generation of baboon boys grew up to be matriarchal and caring, and they would groom each other and help take care of the babies. They would do all the kinds of things that their mothers did, because they only had mothers. They didn’t establish the same aggressive, violently constructed social hierarchy that we had previously assumed to be a figment of baboon physiology and genetics and instinct. All the baboon troops we’d ever seen had been incredibly violent and patriarchal. Turns out there are conditions on which baboons will not act that way.
I believe the troop didn’t stay that way forever. You can imagine all you need is one big bully to come in for bullying to become the effective strategy again.
Luisa Rodriguez: Or hormones in puberty…?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: My understanding is that hormones in puberty were enough to make the fatherless boys grow up into baboons who acted somewhat different from the females, but just not as different as we thought they would. And not different enough to upset the balance on their own.
Luisa Rodriguez: That is fascinating.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. So social animals, animals that have really complex social groups like that, are not extremely rare, but they’re definitely not among the most numerous animals on Earth. And so I don’t think of this as the kind of thing that we should really be trying to fiddle with and scale, but I hold it in my head as like, there just could be so many other arrangements, these alternate stable states, socially or ecologically or in all sorts of different ways that could be possible. And the configurations of nature are not limited to what exists right now.
Luisa Rodriguez: That feels like a great segue to the next category of things I’m interested in, which is: what is the long game for wild animal welfare? Even if we find some robustly good interventions, would that actually solve wild animal suffering? What does success look like to you? Is it more like eradicating poverty, or more like changing the physiology and sociology of wild animals much more radically, or something else?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I don’t know what the longest game looks like. I think that’s a really important part of wild animal welfare research and advocacy: standing with that uncertainty and not trying to jump to conclusions or get stuck on any one vision of something that we just don’t have the tools to envision yet.
I think it’s also useful to point out that I don’t know many people who have an end game for human policy, who can really imagine a world with zero human suffering. There are some ideas out there, and there’s definitely been more science fiction and utopian political science done for humans than there has been for Atlantic cod. But I just want to make sure we’re not holding this movement to too high a standard.
That being said, I can imagine some steps along the way. First step is to get wild animal welfare science to the point where conservation biology is today. That would be a large body of literature in which we understand a lot of the things that we’re studying and have a narrowed set of the next questions to ask.
Also, academic institutions that exist to continuously support and fund and house that kind of research; and governments at all levels really, from local to multilateral, having conservation bodies and recognising conservation as one of the goals that they’re trying to pursue in addition to the many other priorities we have when we’re governing human welfare. So that’s kind of one milestone, and that’s what Wild Animal Initiative as an organisation is optimised to achieve.
Other parts of the vision for the future I think could be imagining social and political systems where wild animals have more representation. So, I can’t imagine ever living in a democracy; I think we’ll always live in an autocracy ruled by a single species — that is, humans. Even if all humans get represented perfectly right, that’s still 0.01% of sentient animals at most. But I can imagine systems where there are regulations that require people, when building new buildings, to consider the impacts on wild animals, or systems that ideally would give wild animals some form of representation.
And there has been some nice utopian legal scholarship on this topic, but there’s also been some real concrete efforts. There’s a great book called Meet the Neighbors by Brandon Keim. It just came out earlier this year, and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in animal ethics and wild animal welfare. He kind of starts from the beginning, of what do we know about sentience, and zooms all the way out to what should we do about tadpoles in puddles?
Luisa Rodriguez: Cool.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: One of the stories he covers is about these cormorants — cormorants are a kind of water bird — living on this one patch of conservation land, I believe an island in Toronto. And they were pooping on all the trees. They have this habit of nesting in big colonies in great densities. This is something that they often do in nature: they will nest in such great densities that they destroy the plant life. Which is often OK. But in the case of Toronto, which had so few green spaces, and the Leslie Street Spit, which was this space that was treasured by so many people, they really didn’t want to give up their one green space.
So the original plan was to eradicate all the cormorants. But then local animal activists took action, and they advocated for the cormorants. And they ended up setting up this ad hoc decision-making process, where they had I believe it was a sort of commission that was deciding how to solve this problem. And there was a person on that commission that was representing the cormorants’ interests. So there’s a cormorant person and there’s also an urban planner and a wildlife management official.
And the solution they ended up coming to was one that did not require any killing of cormorants; it involved moving their nests to certain places when they were away for the winter, and basically discouraging the occupation of one side of the island and encouraging them to occupy the other side of the island.
So I just think it’s so cool, where we’re so far from a political system that entirely encapsulates wild animal interests, but I think things like this will be part of the step toward it. And again, I’m most interested in the science right now, because I think that’s what’s most rate limiting. But I think the social and political systems will be another big part of the long game.
And that’s maybe the edge of where I can imagine, because at least once we have that set up — once we have a way of knowing what the right thing to do is and then ways of putting that into action — those are at least the ingredients you need to continually improve wild animal welfare at larger and larger scales.
Luisa Rodriguez: One out-there possibility that is kind of on the science side that hasn’t come up much is somehow eliminating the biological basis for suffering, or at least some kinds of suffering — like how bad it feels to be really hot, or how bad it feels to be really hungry. Does that seem plausible to you?
I’m trying to think of concrete examples that seem good to me, but as soon as I do, I’m like, “But then they’d die because they’d stop being really motivated to eat or avoid extreme heat.” Is there some version of this that seems plausible to you? Maybe like a stewarded case where we’re helping meet animals’ needs, so it’s less important for them to have lots of physical pain to motivate them to do things?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: This does exist in humans. There’s a disorder. I don’t know what it’s called, but there are some humans who can’t feel physical pain, and very few of them end up living very long. Because even if you have a full human brain — or at least a child or teenager brain — that is oriented toward trying to be aware of risks, so many people are still either tempted to take risks or tolerate things that others wouldn’t tolerate, and end up at least regularly suffering bodily harm, and sadly often dying before adulthood. This is what we observe in the humans who have this condition.
We can imagine a more deliberate version of that. I do think there is this general issue, as you pointed out, that pain seems to be related to motivation to avoid things that are going to be bad for the animal’s survival at least — which is not always the same thing as bad for their welfare, but often pretty closely correlated.
It seems theoretically possible to have a rational actor who recognises noxious stimuli and avoids them without having a direct experience of them. Like, if you were designing an artificial intelligence to do this, you could have them code pain and happiness as red and blue, not as ouch and yay, you know? But it just does seem to be the case that everything that is feeling pain right now, that is a big part of their motivation.
So technically I have no idea how feasible it is. Ecologically and behaviorally, I would worry about the effects of that. Maybe the version that is most imaginable to me is if you had this sort of reaction triggered only in very specific circumstances. We were talking before about how many animals get swallowed whole and digested by stomach acids. Maybe you have a reaction where, if the chemicals that are present in owl stomach acids touch your skin, then your pain response turns off or something. That would probably not make a difference for many mice, and might save many mice from a couple minutes of chemically burning alive. So there might be versions of that that are possible.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That’s making me realise that the only cases I’ve actually heard even weakly proposed are in the case of factory farming, where you might try to eliminate the biological basis of suffering for parts of the factory farming process that are hard to get rid of — like slaughter, or some particular kind of rearing of animals that’s important to how we then raise them for food.
And whether or not that seems like a good idea — we don’t have to solve that now — but I’m realising that that’s because they’re going to die. We can do that because they don’t need to avoid terrible things. In fact, they can’t avoid the terrible things. They’re going to be fattened up according to the system anyways.
But this seems much, much trickier in any cases where wild animals have to go out and live their lives.
Are there any futures for wild animal welfare that we haven’t talked about yet? Or does that feel as close to the vision that you’d want to describe?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: One other category of visions I have, or flavour maybe, is imagining that there could be landscapes that are very different from the ones that exist now. There’s this idea of novel ecosystems becoming of particular interest as climate change shifts around the parameters that certain landscapes are existing under right now. And also there’s the spread of different species, facilitated by humans, invasive species, around the globe.
So we’re already starting to get these novel ecosystems that are happening accidentally. It seems plausible that there could be sets of animals and plants that could just have higher welfare on net than the ones that exist now. Particularly if we were to think that most animals in a forest had net-positive welfare: for example, what if there were forests with trees and plants that just tended to have much more nuts and berries and food was easier to find for everyone?
And there are a bunch of ways that there could be unintended effects on insect populations. Who knows, but you could imagine there could be something that feels more like an orchard to the animals living in it than the forest they live in now.
Or on the other side, if it turns out that there are many kinds of animals that don’t have net-positive lives, maybe there are certain kinds of quieter landscapes that would facilitate more happiness or less suffering. So things that look more like the rocky alpine meadows which people often choose as their representative nature when they put a photo of something on their computer desktop, or stretches of desert.
Just to see how wacky I can get things — I have no idea what the welfare implementation consequences of this would be — but sometimes I imagine, what if you had a desert with a bunch of pools in it, and all the pools had coral reefs in it, and then also there are bison roaming around. Like, what? That might be physically possible. I don’t know.
Luisa Rodriguez: And would be Cam’s preferred —
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Actually, you’re right. This is oddly, suspiciously correlated with the animals and landscapes I enjoy watching. But who knows?
Luisa Rodriguez: I just feel very compelled by the idea that there must be some variation in landscapes and welfare. Surely they’re not all equal. So figuring out what the highest welfare landscapes are, and then figuring out what makes them high welfare and just optimising for that doesn’t seem insane. That feels really cool and hopeful to me.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: And this tracks what humans have been doing for ourselves, right? As we’ve pursued different ways of designing villages and cities, as we found different forms of farming, we’ve been gradually building landscapes that just meet our needs more. So you could imagine incorporating others’ needs into those calculations as well.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. Now that you say that, it really does feel like a lot of the objections I hear to specific wild animal welfare ideas apply to humans, and have been at least semi-resolved in the case of humans. Like when I’m worried about increasing population numbers because we’re eliminating diseases in wild animals, I’m like, that’s exactly what we did for humans — and then we also found a way to support more humans, and now we’ve got a massive population that we’re increasingly able to support and take care of. And maybe we can just do that. It feels like we have a very shortsighted…
Cameron Meyer Shorb: I think shortsightedness is exactly what I would call the biggest problem with assumptions underlying objections to researching and trying to improve wild animal welfare.
So many of the arguments are some form of, “But I can’t do this today or tomorrow.” And I don’t know, maybe there are moral systems out there where you only care about the things you can do today or tomorrow, and benefits to yourself in future years or your grandchildren or their grandchildren don’t matter. But I think most of us do care about the things that will happen later. I think we’re glad for the things that happened before us that benefit us.
So I just mentioned wacky things like deserts filled with coral reefs not because I think they’re good ideas, but just because I need some sort of scaffolding to keep my imagination stretched, and remember that there are things we haven’t imagined yet, and we just want to head in the right direction.
All that being said, I do think there is an important disanalogy to human development, which is that when we’ve made progress for humans, we’ve measured it purely in terms of progress for humans. For example, we’re not even accounting for the harms that has caused for factory farmed animals, right? If you do account for them, then suffering has almost certainly increased among the set of humans plus farmed animals, and by huge orders of magnitudes.
Now, I think you could probably do away with factory farming pretty easily and then balance the equation and it would be a good story. But even so, we have not been accounting for the effects on other species. And the fact is that, like humans, all species currently rely on a whole bunch of other species to exist. So I’m not sure it ever will be possible to have only a few species on Earth who do matter — and as long as there are multiple species who matter, there are almost certainly going to be conflicting interests.
Luisa Rodriguez: Tensions. Yeah, that’s such a good point.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: This is why it might not be possible to have zero suffering, and why it’s probably a lot harder to have a steady increase in wellbeing the way we have had for humans. But again, I don’t think it’s a reason why any improvement at all is necessarily impossible.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yep, that’s such a good point. OK, let’s move on and talk about the work Wild Animal Initiative is doing. My impression is that Wild Animal Initiative’s central aim is to help build the research field of wild animal welfare. Can you say something about how exactly you’re doing this?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: By “field building,” we mean supporting the growth of a research community that will be asking the right kinds of questions, and continually critiquing itself and sustaining itself, and the sort of thing that can support research on a much larger scale than any one group could ever do on its own.
To seed that, we have three main approaches right now. One is we do our own research to answer questions in wild animal welfare directly or to exemplify what wild animal welfare science can look like, or to provide refined tools for other researchers to use. So that’s our research department.
We also have an outreach programme where we present on that research at conferences, we look for opportunities to do research collaborations with others, we provide career services targeted at early-stage researchers — so networking events and workshops on how to design studies that account for wild animal welfare.
In particular, we’ve led a series of workshops at conferences that are about how to add welfare considerations onto your existing research, and what kinds of metrics to use or indicators to use for welfare. This is something that often constrains people: they might be a specialist in animal behaviour but not know anything about how to do genetic analyses. So another thing we try to do through our research programme is directly connect people to collaborate on projects that connect an animal behaviour scientist with a geneticist so they can carry out a project together.
And then finally we have our grants programme, through which we directly fund projects that researchers are carrying out at universities. That’s just a really great way to directly, concretely plant a bunch of seeds in a bunch of different places, and help them grow: give people funding for projects that often wouldn’t get funding otherwise, or wouldn’t be funded for their welfare component.
Or those researchers might feel pressured to not talk about welfare in their research. That’s something we hear a lot. We’re encountering all these people who care about animals — that’s why they’re studying conservation, or that’s why they got into veterinary science or whatever — but they feel like they have to translate everything back into its importance to climate change or biodiversity. So when they get funding from us, they know they get to just talk about what makes the mink happy. And that’s partly about making that research happen.
And also, as you can imagine, that feeds back into all of our other efforts. By funding more people, we’re growing the community, making it easier for early-career researchers to succeed and move forward, and slowly trying to help this field grow.
I also think it’s important to note, and I sometimes am sloppy with my words, we definitely want to avoid any implication that we are the only ones who built this field, or that there was nothing before. Tonnes of people were doing tonnes of relevant research, and we did not come up with this idea. But we are the only organisation that is specifically dedicated to trying to help this research come together in a field-like way, and trying to help that field grow as much as we possibly can.
Luisa Rodriguez: Is there a thing that the Wild Animal Initiative has contributed to that you feel particularly proud of?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. We’ve got a paper under review now, that hopefully will be published by the time the podcast comes out, about measuring indicators of wild animal welfare. This was something where we started out thinking it would be a relatively simple project, and then 85 pages and 30 metrics later, it’s like more of a small encyclopaedia than a short paper.
But the idea is that we’ve reviewed the literature on all of the common or currently existing indicators of welfare, and we’ve ranked these 30 indicators along 11 different criteria to get a sense of how much do we know about the validity of these, the accuracy, the repeatability, how many species they apply to, what kinds of things does it tell you about the welfare, in what kinds of contexts can you use this? The research behind this paper is also research that we’ve been building on to give workshops on this same topic of what kinds of methods can you use to actually approximate welfare in your studies.
I’m just really proud of that. I think it’s going to be a really important thing for the field. And what we’ve done here is, I think, pretty exemplary of what field building can look like. It’s not like we’ve had a tonne of scientists working in a tonne of labs and inventing a whole bunch of new things that were never discovered before. We had a few scientists working at their computers and reading a whole bunch of papers, and just taking the knowledge that already exists and putting it into one place, so that you can easily build on that knowledge and say, “OK, this is what is known.” Or like, “There are a bunch of papers using cortisol as an indicator, but is it really reliable? Who has asked that question and what did they find out?”
So I hope it will be the basis for much more work on research into measures of wild animal welfare. But it’s something that I’m very proud of so far, that a lot of people have contributed to in Wild Animal Initiative. And we also have external collaborators as well.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s so good. It really did feel to me, as I learned more about this topic, one of the places I got most hung up was like, “But how could we possibly know if the things that would be bad for me are bad? And what is the day-to-day life and how much is positive and how much is negative?” ,This just feels like it’s going to accelerate so much work and thinking on that. So that is incredibly cool.
How’s the funding landscape for wild animal welfare as a problem area? I feel like I know about Good Ventures, funded by Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, something about them requiring Open Philanthropy to exit the wild animal welfare space. Am I remembering that right? And has that left a big hole for you from a fundraising perspective?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah. To their credit, Open Philanthropy was far and away the biggest funder of wild animal welfare over the last few years. They started funding some projects, I believe their first one was around 2019, first funding a couple researchers. And then in 2021, they funded the first instantiation of our grants programme that I mentioned.
So they’ve been making a lot of stuff possible on the order of a couple million dollars a year. They’ve definitely left a legacy there. And it’s the folks on the farmed animal welfare team that we have to thank for really pushing to include this new direction.
Unfortunately, Good Ventures, which is the foundation that Open Philanthropy advises, made the call that they wanted to narrow their focus in several ways, so there are several of these smaller, likely highly impactful cause areas that they cut back on. And unfortunately, wild animal welfare is one of them.
Fortunately, The Navigation Fund, which is a new foundation that has really only started up this year, basically has stepped in and has decided to, at least until 2026, fund all of those recurring grantees of Open Philanthropy’s who were dropped because of this decision. That definitely doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s exciting to see that another grantor at least recognises the low-hanging karmic fruit there is here.
It’s an open question whether they will continue to be active in all of the spaces that they’re supporting right now. The Navigation Fund, I believe, is building up its operations and deciding its strategy, and will revisit that decision toward the end of 2026. We’re hoping that they’ll continue to be involved beyond that.
But I think the biggest challenge that wild animal welfare faces from a funding perspective is that the foundations we’ve been talking about are the only multimillion-dollar donors in this space. There’s basically no funding directly available from the traditional funders of basic and applied science. I say no funding directly available because wild animal welfare questions intersect with many other questions, and are funded in the context of biodiversity or just basic science about ecology or animal behaviour or physiology.
But no other funders have identified this as a high priority of research to fund, so it’s the effective altruism community and the farmed animal advocacy communities right now who are really carrying the load and pioneering this new area. We would really like to see more science funders come into space.
And then as far as individual donors go, I think that this is something that is important to a lot of people who are currently primarily supporting conservation or other environmental organisations. I think there’s just a lot of folks that we could connect with there, and we’re hoping we can build out our funding base there as well.
Luisa Rodriguez: For people who aren’t high-net-worth donors, but individual donors… I often have this feeling of like, I’m not going to donate massive amounts of money, and it feels kind of demotivating to me to try to figure out where to donate, because my donation will be a drop in the bucket. How valuable is it for you to have a donor base in this kind of category of smaller donors?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Thanks for asking. It is extremely important. First of all, just in the direct-impact way, every drop that helps fill the bucket helps fill the bucket. I think we often anchor a little too hard on whatever the drops or splashes or whatever are that cause the bucket to overflow, if you will. You know, we’re interested in those tipping points, like, “Can I attach my name to this last thing that definitely happened?”
But in reality, there’s just a lot of work to do, and everyone who can help with whatever amount along the way is advancing that cause. So it’s not like the drop just evaporates out of the bucket. The funding matters. If you have something to give, we’d love your support.
Then also, strategically, smaller donors are very important to us because, as a group, smaller donors tend to be a more reliable funding base. As we were just discussing, Open Philanthropy is an incredible organisation that has funded a lot of great work and made a huge difference. But understandably, Good Ventures changed their minds about what sort of things they wanted to be funding. That’s something that any strategic donor should be able to do, is change your mind. And when the biggest donors move, that creates the biggest vulnerabilities for organisations like ours.
So when there are many smaller donors supporting us, we can look at that chunk of our funding and say, we’re not going to take anyone for granted there. We want to continue demonstrating the value of our work. And we understand that they may or may not continue to believe that we’re a good investment going forward, but if any one of them leaves, that’s not going to create a crisis the way it does when one major donor leaves.
So surprisingly, there’s this counterintuitive element to it, where it’s like, almost by virtue of you not being one giant block underlying the whole thing, you are adding a kind of security that can only come from sand. I don’t know if that analogy works.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I don’t know if that analogy works either, but the whole thing does make a lot of sense to me. And I do feel like I’ve seen blog posts and arguments that at various points say earning to give as a way to do good has become much less important, and then later it’s become much more important — and maybe that volatility should make us just think that it is important: that the donations of people who are not massive funders like Sam Bankman-Fried are offering this other thing — that is not always being the biggest mover of the needle, but isn’t going to do the thing that Sam Bankman-Fried did, or that GoodVentures did here. And yeah, I think that’s kind of a new way to think about it for me, so I find it helpful.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, that’s a darkly hilarious instantiation of exactly this problem, where in this case it wasn’t just one organisation but a whole movement that decided to rely a lot on one huge funder. And then that huge funder pulled out, and the whole movement was left in a tough position.
So you definitely want to take advantage of large funds when they’re available. I also think it’s important to not be too cautious: people were correctly, I think, pointing out, when the FTX Foundation was funding lots of work, that there was a need for more projects to fund. But I don’t think that meant that other people should stop trying to earn to give. I think that’s always going to be an important part.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. OK, let’s leave that there. So I think we agree that one easy way to support work on wild animal suffering is to donate to Wild Animal Initiative. Another important way to contribute is, of course, through your career. What kinds of people or talent does this field need right now?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: The newness and inherent complexity of this field means that it has a really broad surface area. There’s just a lot of things you can work on.
I think as effective altruists, we’re often in the mode of doing the back-of-the-envelope calculation to find the one most effective thing. We’ve tried to do that for wild animal welfare — and for the most part, it’s not that shape of thing. For the most part, it’s something that you can come at from many angles. So I think there are lots of promising career paths here. That’s the first part of my answer.
That being said, right now the movement is definitely bottlenecked by empirical understanding of the scientific questions, which is why we’ve been talking about that so much. So I would highly encourage anyone who is at all interested in a career in natural science research to consider whether they’d be a good fit for that.
Wild animal welfare is an inherently interdisciplinary field. The disciplines broadly that are most central are ecology, animal behaviour science, and physiology — so it’s connecting across those scales that’s often most useful. That’s by no means the end of it, but broadly, I’d say those are the areas most in need of work. And we need people in those areas who are excited about crossing disciplinary lines, and working at multiple scales, and applying new frameworks.
And if you are interested in a career in science, there are lots of pluses, but also lots of minuses to a life in academia. That’s definitely a question to take seriously, and you can have a whole podcast on that alone. But if you’re interested in doing research to advance wild animal welfare, that I’d say is an extra reason to try out a life in academia, if you can. Incredibly competitive, but this is an area where we’re looking both for the object-level understanding of the science and also the social and institutional building of this community. So I think you can make a big difference by publishing a lot of papers.
I also think you can make a big difference by hosting a journal club, or organising a workshop at your university. And we’ve been really lucky the last couple years, because New York University launched the Wild Animal Welfare Program, which is the first-ever programme at a university specifically dedicated to wild animal welfare. That’s headed up by Jeff Sebo and Becca Franks.
And it has been a real game-changer for us to be able to work with an academic partner. I was excited to work on the nonprofit side of things because you can move so quickly, you have so much flexibility, you don’t have to deal with all this bureaucracy — but they can deal with the bureaucracy, and we need some bureaucracy to get done. So all that is to say that the things that make academia annoying are sort of pluses for wild animal welfare, if you’re willing to engage with them.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: So that’s the scientific side of things. Then there’s the policy side, and the intervention side might be other buckets.
Policy, construing this very broadly, could be anything from federal regulations to state or local legislation, even to corporate governance: there’s plenty of companies that have made commitments to certain green actions. If Unilever decided to take rat welfare into account, that would make a huge difference for rats.
So there’s a bunch of different ways you can get at that. I think the policy space is unfortunately quite constrained right now by the number of interventions that we have high confidence can work. But I still think there’s a lot to be said for pushing for the things that we think might work, or helping build decision-making systems that account for wild animal welfare.
The ideal is passing legislation and regulations that require the consideration of wild animal welfare and don’t specify what that means. For example, many places have requirements about environmental impact statements that need to be produced before a major construction project can be given. You could add wild animal welfare to a list of things that needs to be considered, and then that could be a sort of structure to continually incorporate the latest wild animal welfare science into policy.
One more thing I’ll say about policy is that I’m particularly excited about policy on more local scales for wild animal welfare. I think the town and city scale in particular, and somewhat the state scale or whatever the equivalent is in your jurisdiction, is exciting because you tend to have more influence over what actually happens. And I think we’re at a stage in the wild animal welfare movement where experimentation matters more than exploitation of the ideas, if you will. So it’s less about doing more and more of the same thing, and more about trying some things out, or trying things out in several different places.
And there’s already been a lot of interesting work by cities on considering wild animals in their policymaking. The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program and Guarini Centre collaborated on a report about urban wild animal welfare policymaking. That’s definitely worth checking out.
Luisa Rodriguez: Super cool.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: And then on the intervention side: again, different angles you can come at this from, but I think working at conservation and other environmental organisations or wildlife protection organisations can be a way to put yourself in a position to spread these ideas among people who are well positioned to be its most effective advocates, and to incorporate wild animal welfare in other conservation or environmental activities.
I’ll say that I have maybe the fuzziest of ideas here about what this will look like, but especially if you’re early in your career, I think a few years down the road there’ll be more and more opportunities to leverage people in those positions. And since this is a field that is focused on change over the long term, I want to make sure we’re not just looking down at our feet when we’re thinking about the career decisions we’re making.
Finally, another angle on the intervention side would be looking at private sector approaches, or other approaches to developing technologies. For example, there could be a lot of benefit to replacing rodenticides with contraception, or to even just taking existing poisons used for pest control — whether that’s rodents or birds or insects — and replacing them with poisons that just act more quickly, or sometimes there are mechanical alternatives or different crop strains or whatever.
But when it finally gets to the point of, “Here’s an idea for what we can do to improve wild animal welfare,” there’s often either new technology that needs to be produced, or we need to find a way to produce it more cheaply or at larger scales, or we need to find a way to align it with market incentives so that we can actually get this idea off the ground.
And I think there could be a lot of opportunities there. It could look like developing technical expertise in mechanical engineering or biopharmaceuticals or what have you. Or it might look like just learning to be a great manager and capital raiser, and helping be one of those people who takes on the risk of starting one of the first startups that is producing products that will benefit wild animals.
Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Many, many things, which is promising and exciting and means there are lots of opportunities. I have the sense that the field is very small, and I would guess talent constrained. What do you think holds people back from entering this field, even people who might, on paper, be well positioned to make a difference?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: When I see people who seem to be held back from participating in the field, the most common thing holding them back seems to be a sense that they don’t know enough to contribute right now.
And I think what people overlook is the fact that because we know basically nothing about wild animal welfare so far, if you know basically nothing about wild animal welfare, that puts you at the cutting edge of the field! We’re all just making it up. I hope the rest of this podcast will prove that that’s not literally true, but it’s pretty close to being true.
That’s how I felt. That was my excuse for not working in the field before I decided to apply for a job at Wild Animal Initiative. It’s something we hear from a lot of scientists in the scientific context: often they understand one part of the problem, but they don’t have the tools to measure or understand the other part of the problem. They understand the behaviour, but not the ecology; or the ecology, but not the behaviour. And that’s just something that can often be solved relatively easily by collaborating with someone else.
Then related to the idea of their not knowing enough is the sense that there’s not enough that we can do right now. And this is tricky, because I definitely don’t want to overstate the possibility for short-term interventions. A lot of the point of this science is to make more things possible, but I also think that there’s just value to trying things out and getting more constituencies involved, tackling problems from more different angles.
At Wild Animal Initiative, we’ve theorised about how nice it would be if there were a pest control company that was optimising for wild animal welfare. But none of us are actually entrepreneurs, and so none of us are actually figuring out what the real constraints in that area are.
So I think it’s worthwhile to put yourself in a position to make change for wild animals, even if the position you’re in in the short term doesn’t feel the most impactful. I guess what I’m advocating here is if we could quickly learn a lesson that I think effective altruism as a movement took a while to learn — which was, at the early days, I think there was a lot of thinking about, “What’s the one type of person that we most need right now?” And it was like, “We need economists, and computer scientists, and public health experts.”
And then when it grew to the size of a movement, there’s this growing sense of, “Oh, right…”: if you’re going to do movement-scale stuff, you’re going to need some agricultural economists, and a whole bunch of managers, and event coordinators, and just people doing a whole bunch of different stuff, because you need people to do stuff. And these specialties became the rate-limiting thing.
Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. To get people excited about this, what do you think is the best thing about working in the field?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: This probably depends on what kind of person you are. But if you are at all a science or nature nerd, this is the place to be! It’s like you take all of natural science and then you just add this dimension to it, which is welfare. And there’s just a whole new space of questions you can answer. It’s just so cool.
And it’s an excuse — you know, a good EA, mission-driven excuse — to learn about shrimp and capybaras and crayfish and mink and otters… Just the breadth of the field I find incredibly intellectually satisfying and stimulating. And it’s a place where I feel like I’ve gotten closer to the feeling of intellectual play that I have tried to deprive myself of since trying to become more mission driven — but this is a mission that requires a lot of playful exploration.
So that’s probably my favourite part: just that it is useful to learn about a whole bunch of different stuff.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s awesome! One worry I’d have is because, in doing interviews about sentience in nonhuman animals, I’ve been feeling really sad about the scale of it. I wonder if sometimes you or maybe some of your colleagues find it really depressing to think about these issues all the time?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: It varies person to person, but I think that most people have a really strong tendency to underestimate their own ability to acclimate to things. You can look at any depressing career or gruesome career or dirty job or whatever, and the people doing the work are not as sad or grossed out or whatever as you would be upon first encountering it.
I think for a lot of people working in the field, that’s their experience of originally facing the scary possibilities right in the face, and that’s the motivation to switch careers or change your life around or whatever. But then the deeper you get in the work itself, the less it becomes about the suffering of tens of trillions of shrimp, and the more it becomes about emails and deadlines and Google Doc comments — for better or for worse.
Honestly, for me, I think working in the field is just the best antidote to worrying about the problem. Because just at the end of the day, I can take whatever worry I have and then translate it into, Is this useful for me doing more work on my job? Is this changing my mind about what we should do? Or am I just having a little doom spiral here? And then if it’s just a little doom spiral, do I want to keep doing that?
And sometimes the answer is yes. I do really struggle with what the right balance is. I think personally I tend to lean a little too far on the side of detachment and compartmentalisation. Compartmentalisation is a really important skill. I’m now trying to find ways to bring some of the compassion and grief back into my life so that it doesn’t just feel like emails. So that’s a continuing journey for me.
But if you’re worried about it always feeling daunting, then I think that’s probably not going to be the problem that makes this feel unworkable for you.
Luisa Rodriguez: There’s some hints of guilt and motivation in there, which is a great segue to our final question for this interview.
You reached out with the loveliest email of all time to let us know that you got a lot from the chat that Keiran and I had about free will and guilt.
The rough idea is that kind of, if you’re sympathetic to determinism, it doesn’t make sense to feel shame or guilt about the ways you’re not a better, more productive, more moral, more anything person — because you are who you are, and you can’t be otherwise. Unlike free will — which says that individuals make choices — determinism says that all actions are determined by prior causes, and there is no sense in which an individual is truly choosing anything. You are the product of your environment and your genetics, and you’re not making the decisions that you feel like you’re making. You’re just going about living as your body dictates.
Do you want to say what your experience with work-related guilt and shame has been like?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, partly this is because my life is generally pretty good, but also it’s partly because my guilt is so bad that work-related guilt and shame is by far the biggest source of suffering in my life. Maybe it’s not every day, but it is almost every week that I feel really just caught up in worrying about whether I’ve done enough, or how bad it was of me to not do enough, or am I working enough hours?
And there are varying degrees of this. It’s an almost constant presence. Like a lot of my experience of my work day-to-day is like, “Remember, you would be a bad person if you didn’t do more of this.” And then sometimes it has gotten so bad where I’ve lost entire afternoons or entire days to procrastinating, because this turns into such an aversive set of feelings.
Once, in 2020, this kind of merged with my proclivity for depression to get bad enough that I was, I think, a liability to the organisation. I asked my manager to consider firing me, and to lay out a plan for what improvement would look like. And then I got therapy and medication at just the right time. But it can get really, really bad. So that is part of why it was so cool to hear an episode about it.
Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really very moving to me. Thank you for sharing. And also really wonderful to hear that the episode resonated.
I guess some listeners had this worry that — and I relate to this; I feel sympathetic to this worry — that even deterministically, still assuming that free will is not a part of the picture for how we do things, you still need guilt and shame to create the kind of determined motivation to be productive.
Did you have any of that reaction, or do you have a way of thinking about that for yourself?
Cameron Meyer Shorb: That was definitely my inclination for a long time, since I first started thinking about determinism, and then since I started thinking about it in the context of work, and then even after listening to the episode.
So it’s only now with three-plus listens — guys, it’s a really good episode! If you haven’t listened to it, I highly recommend it — have I realised that… First of all, this might not apply to everyone; people vary a lot. But for me, the bittersweet reality is guilt and shame just do not work at all. Or maybe they work sometimes, but there’s a lot of times when they’re just really counterproductive, when they make my experience of work so aversive that I end up avoiding work because I want to avoid the guilt and shame. And then that just destroys the thing. So for me, for better or for worse, it’s just simple enough: just like, no, this doesn’t work. I’ve tried so many ways of trying to make this work, and it doesn’t.
The reason I think that this might apply to many or all people — or at least that I think it’s really worth taking these ideas seriously and trying this out, even if it’s not what you end up sticking with — is that guilt and shame, because of these reasons you discussed with determinism and free will, they’re just inaccurate feelings. They tell a story about the world that is not true. The story they tell is: “If I tried harder, then I would have worked more.” So then you learn the wrong lesson, which is, “Oh! Next time I’m just going to magically be a person that tries harder.”
Whereas if you step away from the guilt and shame, and you just look at every moment or hour as a retrospective, then you can actually identify the actual conditions or mechanisms that are leading you to be more or less productive. And you can notice, like, I was less productive on days when I was more tired or on tasks that I enjoyed less, or when I was thinking about these other things. And those things aren’t always in your control, but sometimes they’re in your control, inasmuch as you can ever control things. And I really feel like it has helped me just learn better how to set myself up for work.
I noticed too there was something about a sense of self or identity that the shame was reinforcing. Something about, “I’m a person who cares so much! Surely I only would have made this mistake if I wasn’t trying hard enough.” But actually the answer is like, “No, I’m a dumb meat machine that is subject to physical and emotional constraints, and I should just really learn how to work this machine, not magically be a better martyr.”
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, I resonate with that a lot.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: And I think the flip side of this is it’s a more useful way of thinking about things, but it is also a harder question to answer, the question of, “Why didn’t I work long enough or hard enough?” If you just, “Because I just didn’t try hard enough” — bam! There’s your answer, there’s your certainty. And you give yourself this illusion at least of knowing how to fix it next time.
But dang, there are so many confounding variables when you look at how productive you are at any one day. And it’s really frustrating to not know and not have that sense of control about how to set yourself up perfectly the next day. But important work is worth doing, and worth doing well, and worth spending a while studying how you do it and what sets you up to do it well. So I think it’s worth asking the more complicated question.
Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, I wish we had another hour. I’m finding this super interesting and motivating. But I think that’s where we have to leave it. Thank you so much. My guest today has been Cameron Meyer Shorb.
Cameron Meyer Shorb: Thank you so much, Luisa.
Luisa Rodriguez: A quick plug that some of you will be listening to this around Giving Tuesday, and might be thinking about where to donate! As Cam’s already mentioned, Wild Animal Initiative is more funding constrained than they used to be because of the changing funding landscape we talked about in the interview. So if you found any of this compelling and you want to contribute, you can do that by going to wildanimalinitiative.org/donate.
All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.
Content editing by me, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris.
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.
Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.
Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.