CRISPR-led gene drives will cheaply and dramatically reduce wild animal suffering

When a friend of the American composer John Cage asked, "Don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?", Cage answered, “No, I think there's just the right amount”. Few ethicists openly express such Zen-like equanimity at the suffering of other sentient beings; but until recently all ecologists shared Richard Dawkins' assumption of its inevitability. However, the living world is on the brink of a technical and ethical revolution - and a major evolutionary transition in the development of life. Humanity will shortly be able to decide the optimal level of suffering both for members of our own species and across the tree of life itself. Not least, CRISPR-driven gene drives can cheaply, rapidly and dramatically reduce suffering in all species of sexually reproducing organism.

Until 21st century biotechnology, the sheer cost, computational complexity and technical obstacles to tackling suffering in free-living non-human animals seemed daunting to anyone who cared about nonhumans. A pan-species welfare state was inconceivable. Cross-species fertility-regulation via immunocontraception, neurochipping, GPS-tracking and monitoring, and rudimentary healthcare services would be prohibitively costly even for large, long-lived vertebrates in human wildlife parks. How could we possibly hope to tackle suffering in marine ecosystems or the Amazon rainforest, short of invoking molecular nanotechnology and what critics would call Drexlerian sci-fi? Actively helping free-living non-humans in an era when millions of people still lack adequate nutrition and healthcare, and when humans still systematically hurt, harm and kill billions of sentient beings in factory-farms and slaughterhouses, has made such a project seem sociologically fanciful as well. Evolution didn't design Homo sapiens to be impartially altruistic.

CRISPR-based "gene drives" are a game-changer. In principle, gene drives can be used - cheaply, rapidly and sustainably - to "fix" the typical level of suffering undergone by members of entire free-living and sexually reproducing species at minimal inconvenience to humans. If targeted wisely, gene drives could massively amplify the effects of even exceedingly weak and fitful human benevolence towards non-human animals. In principle, the level of suffering in any sexually reproducing species of organism could be significantly reduced via genetic tweaking for the cost of around $10,000 of per species or less at current prices. Back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests the financial cost of a happy non-human biosphere would currently be several hundred million dollars - plus annual maintenance costs of perhaps several million dollars per year.

Hyperbole? No...