EA - Lobbying governments to improve wild animal welfare by saulius

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lobbying governments to improve wild animal welfare, published by saulius on August 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer. Summary Some wild animal welfare (WAW) advocates promote research of WAW in academia, hoping that this will help us to lobby governments (which have the most control over nature) to pursue WAW interventions, and to know what interventions to lobby for. In this article, I first explain the theory of change in more detail, and list changes that governments could do if lobbied successfully. Then I discuss potential obstacles to influencing governments: It’s likely that the welfare of small but very numerous wild animals dominate WAW considerations. But it’s difficult to imagine governments caring about the well-being of small uncharismatic animals like insects or fish in a scope-sensitive way and taking major actions to improve their welfare. Counterarguments: WAW is huge in scale even if it only focuses on vertebrates. Also, it could have been similarly difficult to imagine governments funding species conservation efforts until it happened. The consequences of interventions on the welfare of all affected wild animals seem nearly impossible to determine, even with a lot of research. Also, research in one ecosystem might not generalize to other ecosystems. Hence, we are unlikely to reach solid conclusions on which WAW interventions are good. Counterargument: This is the same as the concern of cluelessness that applies to all causes. Hence, it’s unclear whether this is a legitimate argument to prioritize other causes over WAW. However, in my experience, contrary to other causes, people seem to notice that we are clueless about WAW impacts right away, which might make influencing governments more difficult. Even if we determine consequences, people with different moral views might disagree on which consequences they prefer. For example, people may disagree on how to weigh various positive and negative experiences, how to weigh the welfare of different animal species, etc. This may eventually divide the WAW movement into many camps and hurt overall efforts. I know very little about the history of other social movements, so I don’t know how important these obstacles are. Finally, I provide some thoughts on what should be prioritized within WAW. Context I started writing this article as a criticism of some of the current WAW movement-building efforts. Compared to longtermist causes, influencing governments to care about WAW to me seemed similarly speculative but much less important. It also didn’t have the certainty of impact of some farmed animal welfare interventions. My main concern was that influencing governments to care about WAW seems very difficult to achieve. However, comments and counterarguments from reviewers made me less skeptical about it. So in this article I now just talk about this approach as a potential avenue to improve WAW, and leave it to readers to form opinions on how promising it is. Current theory of change Here is the current theory of change for WAW in the medium term, according to some WAW proponents I talked to: Consider the following vision of the future. WAW is an established academic field, with many scientists working on determining the animal welfare consequences of various actions. This research informs us on how to help wild animals and also legitimizes caring for WAW. Governmental organizations, the effective altruism (EA) movement, and possibly environmental organizations use the conclusions of this research to guide their actions to improve WAW, much like how various entities currently use research to reduce their environmental footprint and to protect endangered species. This potential future could help wild animals...