Wild animal life is not net suffering

I’ve been surprised to learn recently that so many people I know in the effective altruism community believe there is more total suffering than happiness in the lives of wild animals. Brian Tomasik appears to be the main current proponent of this view, developing the work done by economist Yew-Kwang Ng in the 90s. Tomasik has taken his concerns with wild animal suffering (WAS) to its logical limit, arguing we should consider destroying ecosytems so that fewer animals exist. This cuts against the popular intuition, frequently promoted by nature documentaries, that wild animals live enjoyable, if somewhat barbaric, lives and are best left to their own devices. As the number of animals in the wild is so vast, WAS is therefore potentially of huge moral importance. Concerned that I had overlooked the area, I investigated. After some consideration, I think the arguments in favour of there being net WAS are unconvincing. I decided to write this essay to explain why others should be similarly unconvinced. I’ve reconstructed Tomasik’s argument below and then set out five objections. For readers impatient for the punchline, the thrust of my argument is 1) the case for net wild animal is highly selective, relying on imagining obviously bad aspects of animals’ lives, such as being eaten alive, rather than accounting for all their positive and negative experiences and 2) it requires immense speculation about how good or bad animals’ experiences are (e.g. how many hours of eating grass is equivalent to 5 minutes of being eaten alive? how many unhappy ants is worth one happy lion?). We should be wary of overstepping our epistemic limits and engaging in careless anthropomorphism. I, briefly, present my own moral response: certain, targeted interventions may reduce WAS but habitat destruction is unlikely to be justified. I note WAS is unlikely to be a particularly cost-effective way of reducing suffering. To be clear, I do not claim the lives of wild animals are net positive or negative overall. I do not think I (or anyone else) can show that. Nor do I deny there is wild animal suffering. There clearly is. My point is that Tomasik overstates the case for net wild animal suffering and understates the difficult of making interpersonal and interspecies comparisons of happiness.