Giving Compass' Take:

• The author argues that we don't know if there cost-effective interventions for wild animal welfare because there is insufficient research in the field. 

• How can funders help to build up research and information in the wild animal welfare space? 

• Read about proven animal welfare interventions. 

I sometimes see people claiming very confidently that wild-animal welfare is completely intractable and there are no cost-effective interventions we can do to improve wild animals’ welfare.

This is honestly a quite extraordinarily claim. Think of all the ways human beings affect wild animals already: bird feeders, wildlife tourism, hunting, pest control, failing to adequately secure our dumpsters, disease control, air and water pollution, climate change, outdoor pets, invasive species, and so on and so forth. Are you telling me that there is not literally one of the dozens of ways we affect wild animals that has a knowable positive or negative effect on them? Perhaps some deity with a particularly odd ethical system has cursed us to an eternal neutrality, such that every rat we kill humanely will cause another rat to die horribly of poison?

The answer to this claim is that while of course ecosystems are dynamic and unpredictable systems and it is impossible to state with literally 100% certainty that cutting down the entire rainforest would be a bad conservation strategy, we do possess things like “non-zero level of knowledge about ecology” and “common fucking sense” that point to destroying their habitat being a poor way of protecting endangered species. Similarly, while there are tragic and costly mistakes, we can mostly figure out optimum sustainable yields for fisheries; most of the problem is in getting people to follow them instead of fishing as much as they damn well please. It is possible to know things about complicated systems with sufficient certainty that action is a better idea than nonaction.

For most possible interventions– disease control, predator control, wildlife contraception, supplemental feeding, and so on–we don’t even know whether doing the thing would be good or bad. Again, not because it’s unknowable; just because there’s a limited amount you can do with twelve nonexperts working part time.

Read the full article about wild animal welfare at Thing of Things.