Why Wild Animal Suffering Matters

I recently posted a prediction on X: 100 years from now, people will see wild animal suffering as the most neglected moral issue of our age. This led to unsurprising negative reactions, ranging from skepticism to outright hostility. So I thought I’d very briefly unpack my reasons for thinking that wild animal suffering is an incredibly-important moral issue. (I’ll reserve for another occasion why I think future generations will care about it.)

Reason 1 is that the scale of wild animal suffering is enormous. A single family of wild fish, the bristlemouth fish, has a population ranging from hundreds of trillions to hundreds of quadrillions. If even 1% of those bristlemouth fish are suffering, that would be a larger number, by about an order of magnitude, than all the farmed animals on planet earth today.

Reason 2 is that there are forces that make the percentage of wild animals who are suffering, including in bristlemouth fish populations, far higher than 1%. The first force is human impacts on wild systems. Most species do not adapt as quickly or as easily as human beings. Our effective terraforming of our planet, via agriculture and climate change, is likely causing immense suffering to large populations of animals. Indeed, this is why most terrestrial vertebrates have been wiped off the planet, and why others, including the bristlemouth fish, are suffering from mass population declines.

The second force is predation. Interestingly, carnivores probably have not existed for most of life’s history on this planet, perhaps 600 million out of life’s 3.7 billion year history. But their birth likely caused a burst of evolution, as it turns out that stealing energy by consuming other animals was a highly-adaptive way of propagating one’s genes. What is good for genes, however, is not good for sentient beings. Being hunted and eaten by another animal is now a dominant experience among the sentient creatures of this earth; that is not a plesant way to die.

The third force is r-selection. Animals reproduce using two different strategies. One strategy, K selection, involves producing a small number of offspring with high investment in each individual child. This is how human beings operate. The other strategy, r selection, involves a large number offspring with negligible investment in each individual child. The result for this latter set of species, which probably includes most of the small (and numerous) species of this earth, is offspring that suffer short miserable lives, including mass starvation by at least the hundreds of trillions.¹ We are rightly concerned about the hunger of 2 million people in Gaza. What if I told you that a different system — r selection in nature — caused mass starvation in 1 million times as many beings?

In short, it’s not just the number of animals in the wild that exist that make wild animal suffering an important moral issue but the percentage who are likely suffering in ways that are profoundly disturbing.

But that brings us to Reason 3 wild animal suffering matters: acts are not that different from omissions. As Peter Singer argued 50 years ago, a man who passes by and watches a child drowning, and refuses to help because it might cause $5 in damage to their pants, is not that different from a man who drowns a child for $5. In either case, the man is prioritizing $5 over a child’s life. The same is true for animals. If an animal is being torn to pieces alive, or starved to death, the key moral question is not whether this has come about because of some human act, but rather whether we have the power to stop it.

This is where we get to the central doubt I have on the importance of wild animal suffering. Perhaps it is out of our control to stop. This is clearly not the case for some forms of wild animal suffering, such as the suffering caused by deoxygenation of oceans and climate change. But perhaps most other wild animal suffering is simply beyond our power to change. That may well be the case. Human beings do not have the best track record of intervening in natural systems. But the fact that we have not even thought much about the issue suggests that, at minimum, it’s far too soon to reach a firm conclusion.

But what’s the point of any of this? Given that we can’t convince human beings to stop acting with grotesque cruelty towards the animals directly under our control, what are the prospects of convincing them to help a starving bristlemouth fish? I’m not suggesting, necessarily, that we dramatically change the way we do advocacy. However, a consideration of wild animal suffering probably does significantly shift our priorities away from the mere elimination of factory farming and towards a greater awakening of the human conscience. We have to change people’s hearts, and not just their diets.

Otherwise, even if we take the animal off our plates, we may leave a million times more suffering in ways that are just as nightmarish as the suffering of factory farms.

1. We can get to this result by assuming there is at least one starving animal per single living bristlemouth fish. That is likely a huge underestimate.