Why we ignore the suffering of wild animals: Understanding our biases

By Animal_Ethics @ 2025-06-25T11:13 (+50)

This is a linkpost to https://www.animal-ethics.org/why-we-ignore-the-suffering-of-wild-animals-understanding-our-biases/

A hidden crisis

Literally, quintillions¹ of animals are suffering and dying right now in the wild, due to disease, hunger, thirst, excessive heat or cold, and other factors. Yet, most people—including those who express concern for animals—fail to give importance to this issue. Why?

In this article, we explore the cognitive biases² that lead us to ignore one of the world’s largest sources of suffering and death.³ Understanding these biases can help us think more clearly about our moral responsibilities.

The magnitude of the problem

When we think of animal suffering, we often picture factory farms or labs that test on animals. These are indeed serious problems. But the number of wild animals is vastly larger, estimated between 1 and 10 quintillion at any given time.⁴

To understand this, consider the following analogy:

If we compressed the total number of animals exploited by humans and the total number of wild animals into a one-year timeline, the animals used by humans would represent just 14 seconds. Wild animals would represent the remaining 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 46 seconds.¹

The vast majority of wild animals suffer daily due to natural causes. Despite its immense scale, this issue receives very little attention. Even among animal advocates and animal ethicists, the problem remains largely ignored. This doesn’t seem logical when looking at the figures. Below, we will explore several biases that can cause this.

Status quo bias: Resistance to changing beliefs

Our minds are naturally resistant to change, whether in habits or beliefs. This is known as status quo bias. Several related patterns reinforce this:

• Bandwagon effect: we tend to believe what those around us believe
• System justification bias: we defend current systems and norms
• Conservatism bias: we hesitate to update our beliefs, even with new evidence

Key question: If everyone around you focused only on animal exploitation, how likely would you be to think about the suffering of wild animals resulting from natural processes?

Neglect of small animals

Most wild animals are small, like insects, crustaceans, and fish. However, our brains tend to care more about animals that are:⁶

• Larger in size
• More intelligent (or perceived as such)
• Emotionally relatable to humans

This creates a blind spot (i.e., a situation we are unaware of) because the majority of suffering animals are precisely those that our biases make us overlook. This is also seen in farmed animals, such as shrimps, are the most exploited,⁷ but seldom mentioned by animal advocates.

Key question: When you think of wild animals, do you think of large animals, such as deer, lions, or elephants, or small animals, such as insects or crustaceans? Your answer reveals how this bias works.

Compassion Fade / The loss of compassion effect

Here’s something surprising: the greater a tragedy, the less it matters to us emotionally. This is also called the Compassion Fade/loss of compassion effect, which occurs, among other things, because of the identifiable victim effect: we tend to care more about specific individuals than about large groups.

Example: A news story about the suffering of a single animal generates a stronger emotional response than statistics about the suffering of billions of animals. Our compassion tends to decrease when numbers increase, mainly because in the latter case, we see numbers, not the many individuals the numbers represent.

Key question: How do you react emotionally when you hear about the suffering of a single animal, and how do you react when you hear about the suffering of billions or trillions?

Scope neglect

Compare 434 billion (the number of animals exploited by humans) to 1-10 quintillion (the number of wild animals).⁸ Our brain perceives both as simply “very large”, rather than recognizing that one is vastly larger than the other. Remember that in section 2 of this article, to visualize the size difference between the population of two groups of animals, we had to use an analogy involving the period of a year. This bias is known as scope neglect or scope insensitivity: our brain struggles to perceive the size difference between enormous numbers.

Availability heuristic

Our brain uses mental shortcuts to make quick decisions. These shortcuts are called heuristics. The availability heuristic involves assuming that what we remember most easily are the most common events. This heuristic creates major problems when we think about situations affecting animals in general, especially when we think about the situation of wild animals.

What we recall: Nature documentaries showing majestic, healthy adult animals living a good life

What’s real in nature: Most wild animals are tiny, die very young, and suffer immensely

Survivorship bias

In nature, for every animal that survives, thousands or even millions of others do not. However, because we usually don’t have this information, and because animals that die soon are not visible to us, we only notice those that survive. The few survivors become our mental image of life in nature, and so we tend to believe that most of the wild animals born survive. It's similar to assuming that lottery winners represent all gamblers. This is an example of survivorship bias.

Food for thought: If 99.99% of animals born in the wild die painfully shortly after birth, but we only see the 0.01% who survive, how does this influence our perception of what life is like for animals living in the wild?

False deduction: “Since humans harm, nature helps”

Another factor that leads many people to believe that natural processes have a positive impact for animals is a flawed deduction: “If human actions have a negative impact on animals, it is obvious that natural processes have a positive impact, because they are not caused by humans.” This deduction is flawed: the fact that human actions have a negative impact on animals does not mean that natural processes have a positive impact.

Idyllic view of nature

Many people have an idyllic and unrealistic view of life in nature. They think that most animals had lives dominated by positive experiences before humans interfered. This idyllic view ignores many obvious issues:

• Natural disasters existed before humans
• Disease and starvation have always been present
• The reproductive strategy of having thousands or millions of offspring, the vast majority of which don’t survive, has been present in species before the emergence of humankind

One of the factors contributing to the prevalence of this idyllic view of life in nature is anchoring bias, which leads us to trust the first information we receive about a topic. The first ideas we learn about nature (often through children's books, movies, and documentaries) determine how we will continue to view it. However, these initial positive impressions do not align with the actual reality.

Tendency to justify natural suffering

Faced with information that natural processes tend to maximize suffering, many people try to justify it by assuming that it must serve some greater purpose. Several biases contribute to this tendency:

• Agency detection bias: assuming someone is intentionally causing these events
• Teleological bias: the tendency to attribute a purpose to events that have no purpose
• Just-world hypothesis: believing the world is inherently fair

We can observe that these biases interact, as it is insufficient for a person to merely believe there is an agent responsible for their suffering; they also need to hold the belief that the intended goal of this agent is justified.

Key question: Is it wrong to prevent natural disasters or natural diseases that kill millions of people, since that would interfere with some grand plan for a greater good?

Double standard regarding acts and omissions

Most people tend to feel more accountable for harmful actions than for equally or even more harmful omissions. Some may even believe they bear no moral responsibility for failing to help at all. These attitudes reflect omission bias.

Omission bias can influence how we view negligence, particularly in cases involving harm from natural processes, since such harms continue without any direct action from us.

Key question: Should what matters be the source of the harm (whether it arose from human practices or natural processes) or the extent of harm we could prevent?

Proportion bias

Our brains often focus on percentages rather than actual numbers. This can lead us to make very poor decisions when faced with large-scale problems.

Example:
Which would we prefer?

• Helping 90% of animals in a problem affecting 1,000 animals (i.e., helping 900 animals)
• Helping 0.1% of animals in a problem affecting 10 million animals (i.e., helping 10,000 animals)

Even though the second option helps over ten times as many animals, many people intuitively prefer the first. This is due to proportion bias, our tendency to favor actions that help a higher percentage of a group, even when the absolute number helped is smaller.

Near-term bias

We have a tendency to focus on immediate results rather than long-term benefits. This is an example of Near-term bias, a type of temporal bias that causes us to assign less importance to events the further they are in the future.

As a result, we often dismiss solutions that take time to develop, even if they would clearly be better when viewed over the long term. This bias leads many to downplay the importance of addressing wild animal suffering, simply because large-scale solutions may not be immediate.

Reminder: Many medical advances have required decades of research. If we only funded research that showed immediate results, we wouldn’t achieve most of the major breakthroughs.

The bubble effect (false consensus)

Animal advocates often assume that the general public won’t care about wild animal suffering because:

• Many vegans don’t care about this issue
• Most people aren’t vegan

This reasoning contains several flaws, which we’ll explore below.

Misconceptions

• You have to be vegan to care about wild animals
• Vegans are more likely to help wild animals
• Current vegan views reflect the views of the general public

One factor behind these assumptions is the false consensus effect, also known as the bubble effect, in which it is assumed that the opinions of members of one’s own group reflect the opinions of the majority of people.

Accepting the proposal to help wild animals does not require changing the way we eat and dress. It only requires supporting the necessary research and policies. In fact, this may be easier for most people to accept than veganism.

“No one cares” often means “I don’t want them to care”

Often, when someone says “give it up, because no one will care about it,” they are actually disguising “give it up, because I don’t want anyone to care about it.” So it’s worth trying to figure out whether an alleged concern for public opinion is genuine or whether it’s masking an objection to what’s being proposed. This pattern can appear not only in conversations between people, but also in the way people talk to themselves. This is an example of self-deception bias.⁹

Reducing the influence of bias

Even when we understand these biases intellectually, they do not automatically disappear.¹⁰ Changing our emotional reactions, intuitions, and gut feelings takes practice and conscious effort.

Key insight: Just like developing any other skill, overcoming biases requires consistent practice over time.

So when thinking about the issue of wild animal suffering (or any other issue), ask yourself: Am I reasoning honestly and following the conclusions of that reasoning, even if they indicate that I need to change my previous thinking, or am I adjusting the reasoning and information so that I do not need to change my previous thinking?

That is, the constant practice of intellectual honesty is already a way of trying to reduce the influence of these biases on ourselves.

Something to think about:

Biases are intuitive and naturally occurring. What does this tell us about how we should make moral decisions? Are our intuitions a good guide to those decisions?

Key idea: Practicing intellectual honesty, regularly checking whether we’re adjusting our reasoning to fit reality, or bending reality to fit our existing views, is a way to reduce bias over time.

Final reflection: Biases are intuitive and automatic. What does this tell us about how we make moral decisions? Can we always trust our instincts?

Notes

1 National Museum of Natural History & Smithsonian Institution (1996) “Numbers of insects (species and individuals)”, Smithsonian, Information Sheet Number 18 [accessed on 4 June 2025]. Tomasik, B. (2019 [2009]) “How many animals are there?”, Essays on Reducing Suffering, Aug 07 [accessed on 3 June 2025].

2 For a general introduction to the different types of biases, see The Decision Lab (2021) “Biases”, The Decision Lab [accessed on 4 June 2025].

3 For more on how cognitive biases influence our responses to the problem of wildlife suffering, see Vinding, M. (2020) “Ten biases against prioritizing wild-animal suffering”, Magnus Vinding, July 2 [accessed on 12 June 2025]; Cunha, L. C. (2024a) “Vieses que inclinam a uma negligência da situação dos animais selvagens”, Senciência e ética: perguntas e respostas, 22 de abril de 2024 [accessed on 13 June 2025].

4 National Museum of Natural History & Smithsonian Institution (1996) “Numbers of insects (species and individuals)”, op. cit. Tomasik, B. (2019 [2009]) “How many animals are there?”, op. cit.

5 This comparison concerns the population of exploited animals and the population of wild animals at a given time. For more details on this comparison, see Tomasik, B. (2019 [2009]) “How many animals are there?”, op. cit.

6 On what biological factors lead us to have more or less empathy for certain types of animals, see Miralles, A.; Raymond M. & Lecointre, G. (2019) “Empathy and compassion toward other species decrease with evolutionary divergence time”, Scientific Reports, 9, 19555 [accessed on 2 June 2025].

7 For statistics on shrimp farming, see Waldhorn, D. R. & Autric, E. (2023) “Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production”, OSF Preprints, September 08 [accessed on 12 June 2025]. For a comparison of the quantities of each type of animal exploited, see Cunha, L. C. (2024b) “Quais problemas afetam as maiores quantidades de animais? – Um breve resumo”, Senciência e ética: perguntas e respostas, 20 de fevereiro de 2024 [accessed on 3 June 2025].

8 Tomasik, B. (2019 [2009]) “How many animals are there?”, op. cit.

9 On the relationship between cognitive biases and self-deception, see Nicholson, A. (2007) “Cognitive bias, intentionality and self-deception”, Teorema, 26 (3), pp. 45-58 [accessed on 13 June 2025].

10 On how the perception of some biases may already be sufficient to overcome them, see Caviola, L.; Faulmüller, N.; Everett, J. A. C.; Savulescu, J. & Kahane, G. (2014) “The evaluability bias in charitable giving: Saving administration costs or saving lives?”, Judgment and Decision Making, 9, pp. 303-315 [accessed on 1 June 2025]. On why, in relation to other biases, this is insufficient to overcome them, see Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.