Wild animal suffering is super neglected compared with factory-farming, and this is super neglected compared with conflicts, epidemics/pandemics, and global warming

By Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-03-30T08:41 (+41)

Summary

Introduction

I have argued farmed animals are very neglected compared to humans. I think they respect a much larger welfare loss while there is way less funding helping them. In this post, I do a similar analysis comparing factory-farming and wild animal suffering with conflicts, epidemics/pandemics, and global warming.

Methods

Here are my calculations.

Welfare loss

I estimate the annual welfare loss from conflicts, epidemics/pandemics, and global warming multiplying:

In my past similar analysis, I relied on the human welfare loss in 2021, so I did not fairly account for the welfare loss from:

In this analysis, I estimate the expected annual deaths from conflicts and epidemics/pandemics as a fraction of the global population based on 101 (= 2000 - 1900 + 1) and 124 years (= 2023 - 1900 + 1) of historical data adjusted for underreporting. For conflicts, from 1900 to 2000. For epidemics/pandemics, from 1900 to 2023.

For global warming, I rely on projections from Human Climate Horizons for the expected annual deaths from non-optimal temperature as a fraction of the global population in 2050, relative to the temperature in 1986-2005, for “2°C of warming by mid-century, and 2.5°C by 2100”, which I think is close to the expected global warming. They also have projections for 2030 and 2090, but 2030 felt too early to capture concerns about a warming world, and 2090 too late for predictions to be reliable.

I determine the annual welfare loss from factory-farming adding that of farmed decapod shrimp, farmed fish, and poultry birds, and that of wild animal suffering from that of wild arthropods, which I believe account for the vast majority of the welfare loss. I calculate each of these multiplying:

Spending

I set the annual spending improving:

Results

Welfare loss

The reference years are inside parentheses.

Spending

The reference years are inside parentheses.

Welfare loss per spending

Discussion

The welfare loss from global warming is much smaller than that from epidemics/pandemics, this is smaller than that from conflicts, this is negligible compared with that from factory-farming, and this is negligible compared with that from wild animal suffering. The welfare loss from factory-farming and wild animal suffering are 2.30 k (= 1.27*10^11/(55.3*10^6)) and 548 M (= 3.03*10^16/(55.3*10^6)) times the human welfare loss from malaria in 2020 of 55.3 M DALYs. So I estimate this corresponds to 3.81 h (= 365.25*24/(2.30*10^3)) of factory-farming, or 0.0576 s (= 365.25*24*60^2/(548*10^6)) of wild animal suffering.

The spending on the improvement of wild animal suffering is negligible compared with that of factory-farming, this is negligible compared with that of epidemics/pandemics, this is smaller than that of global warming, and this is smaller than that of conflicts.

The welfare loss per spending for global warming is much smaller than that for conflicts, this is smaller than that for epidemics/pandemics, this is negligible compared with that for factory-farming, and this is negligible compared with that for wild animal suffering. As a result, wild animal suffering is super neglected compared with factory-farming, this is super neglected compared with epidemics/pandemics, these are neglected compared with conflicts, and these are very neglected compared with global warming.

How about AI? I believe global catastrophic risk (GCR) from transformative AI (TAI) will manifest through conflicts and epidemics/pandemics if anything, so I take it to be covered. Ok, but conflicts and epidemics/pandemics will get worse as we approach The Precipice, right? I agree with David Thorstad that risks have been exaggerated. I expect those from conflicts and epidemics/pandemics to decrease over time. I estimated the annual conflict deaths as a fraction of the global population decreased 0.121 orders of magnitude (OOMs) per century from 1400 to 2000 (coefficient of determination of 8.45 %), and the annual epidemic/pandemic deaths as a fraction of the global population decreased 0.459 OOM/century from 1500 to 2023 (38.5 %). Interesting, but their tail risk can still be increasing, as their variance has increased despite the decreasing means? I estimated the variances over the last 10 years of the logarithm of the annual conflict and epidemic/pandemic deaths as a fraction of the global population have very weak trends over the aforementioned periods (1.90 % and 1.61 %). Why is historical data relevant? We are on the cusp of TAI! I am happy to bet 10 k$ against short AI timelines.

One should donate based on the marginal cost-effectiveness of organisations, not the welfare loss per spending of the areas they work in. However, I have concluded the most cost-effective organisations work on improving factory-farming or wild animal suffering. I estimate:

My estimates for the cost-effectiveness of animal welfare interventions are proportional to the welfare range of the animals helped, which I set to RP’s medians. If you think the welfare range regarding a given species is x times RP’s median, you can multiply my estimate for that species by x. The same applies to my estimates of the welfare loss linked to factory-farming and wild animal suffering.

I recommend donating to the Arthropoda Foundation, SWP, or WAI.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Abraham Rowe for feedback on RP’s spending on wild animal welfare, Cat Kerr on the draft, and Mal Graham on the spending on wild animal welfare[1]. The views expressed in the post are my own.

  1. ^

     I listed the names alphabetically.


huw @ 2025-03-30T13:35 (+3)

Heya Vasco, I think I might be missing something here. I’m struggling to see the connection between this post and your recommendation to donate to WAI.

In the past, I’ve heard that wild animal suffering is probably not very tractable. Is that true for both insects and vertebrates? What about WAI sets them up for success here? (You mention they support research into pesticides, but not direct work?)

abrahamrowe @ 2025-03-30T14:48 (+30)

Not commenting on WAI specifically, I kind of dislike the "wild animal suffering in not very tractable" meme because it feels like it emerged before anyone ever even tried to figure out how tractable it was, and before basically any science happened in the space, but has just stuck, based on armchair philosophizing by non-scientists (me among them, to be clear). It sometimes feels a bit like saying curing polio is intractable before anyone ever tried to look into making a vaccine or think about what we could do to try to cure it — we're not going to know the tractability of interventions until we actually look into it in detail, and people with the right kind of expertise to evaluate WAW's tractability have barely started doing so. 

It's also just a massive space — it seems pretty unreasonable to say that, given that hundreds of quadrillions of animals at least as complicated as insects, live vastly different lives across the world in thousands of kinds of biomes/ecosystems, etc, that helping ~none of them is going to be possible without at least trying to look into it for a minute.

My personal belief is that we will probably have good wild animal welfare interventions sooner than we'll have good marginal uses for farmed animal money beyond current interventions, which suggests that the research seems pretty worth it.

I also think that wild animal welfare just remains a problem for ~everyone, given that wild animal welfare impacts are downstream from most other interventions, so solving it should be a big priority. Insofar as people think that wild animal suffering is intractable because of uncertain impacts of your intervention on other wild animals, surely that would basically just apply to anything you do in the world that impacts wild animals (which is probably basically everything). If you buy the case for wild animals mattering morally, but think that downstream effects make it impossible to act on it, most charity seems to get stuck.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-04-06T18:37 (+4)

Great points, Abraham!

I also think that wild animal welfare just remains a problem for ~everyone, given that wild animal welfare impacts are downstream from most other interventions, so solving it should be a big priority. Insofar as people think that wild animal suffering is intractable because of uncertain impacts of your intervention on other wild animals, surely that would basically just apply to anything you do in the world that impacts wild animals (which is probably basically everything). If you buy the case for wild animals mattering morally, but think that downstream effects make it impossible to act on it, most charity seems to get stuck.

Agreed. Here are some calculations illustrating the effects of GiveWell's top charities on wild animals can easily be much larger than those on humans. I would say accounting for effects on farmed animals alone is enough to make it unclear whether extending human lives increases or decreases welfare.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-03-30T15:12 (+5)

Thanks, Huw.

I’m struggling to see the connection between this post and your recommendation to donate to WAI.

In the past, I’ve heard that wild animal suffering is probably not very tractable. Is that true for both insects and vertebrates? [...]

Cost-effectiveness takes into account tractability, research on more humane pesticides looks super cost-effective, and WAI has supported work on that, although I do not know which fraction of the marginal donations to WAI funds that work.

What about WAI sets them up for success here? (You mention they support research into pesticides, but not direct work?)

WAI has been recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) since 2020. You may want to check their last review from 2023 (very brief summary below). My case for recommending WAI is mostly about figuring out ways of cost-effectively helping wild animals in the future, and building a movement and research field to enable that.

Wild Animal Initiative is a U.S.-based organization working to improve our understanding of wild animals’ lives by advancing the field of wild animal welfare science. By conducting their own research and supporting other wild animal researchers, Wild Animal Initiative aims to increase academic interest in wild animal welfare and identify evidence-based solutions to improving wild animals’ wellbeing.