Some raccoons in my yard have recently been stealing food intended for a feral cat I’m trying to adopt, which has me wondering about the morality of intentionally feeding wild animals.
Some reasons often cited for why feeding animals like raccoons is a bad idea: - They might lose their fear of humans, endangering both themselves and people. - They’re trapped in a Malthusian nightmare where more food will cause their population to explode until the average individual is no better off, then collapse through starvation when the human doing the feeding moves away. - They might ordinarily pass knowledge between generations through imitation, so changing their behavior through feeding might cause important behaviors to be lost between generations.
However, it’s looking like we might be just a few years away from some kind of singularity, and so it occurs to me that those reasons might not hold the water they once did. There seems to be a chance that wild animals could now enjoy the short-term benefit of being fed without suffering the long-term consequences- either because a well-aligned ASI could help humanely manage their population or because they, like us, are bound for an existential catastrophe.
Granted, there’s still the objection that wild animals losing their fear is dangerous in the short term (particularly in the extremely rare case of a rabies infection), though it seems like that could be avoided just by only leaving food out when they aren’t present.
We do also have to account for the possibility that we’re very wrong about the future rate of progress, and this doesn’t address the concern that more wild animals are a nuisance in cities. Still, a potential opportunity to be kind to animals we haven’t been able to be kind to in the past does strike me as valuable enough to be worth some risks.
So, what do LW people think: would it be morally correct to leave out enough food for both the cat and the raccoons?
Outside of the specific example, and I’m not sure if you meant it this way, but I would caution against using “the world as we know it might end soon” as a reason to make decisions that would be bad if the world somehow stayed mostly normal.
To the specific example, I would search (or ask an LLM) for expert sources on raccoon behavior and welfare, and run with their conclusions.
I am reminded of the old joke about Newton[1] cutting a large hole in his door for the mama cat and a few small holes for each of the kittens. I guess in principle, it might be possible to glut your yard with enough food to satiate all the neighborhood raccoons, but I expect that’ll take vastly more food than you imagine, and to come with a host of new problems. Instead consider deploying some kind of cat-specific elevated feeding station – it looks lots of people like cats enough to have thoroughly solved precisely the problem you’re encountering.
I greatly enjoy feeding ducks in my local park, so I am biased, but to me the reasons for not feeding them have never quite held up. (although of course they should be fed food appropriate for their digestive system). Specifically on the Malthusian trap, it seems that I either don’t feed the wild animal and it dies from starvation, or I feed it, it reproduces and then its offspring dies from starvation, which is neutral in terms of animals dying from starvation at least within that species.
Some raccoons in my yard have recently been stealing food intended for a feral cat I’m trying to adopt, which has me wondering about the morality of intentionally feeding wild animals.
Some reasons often cited for why feeding animals like raccoons is a bad idea:
- They might lose their fear of humans, endangering both themselves and people.
- They’re trapped in a Malthusian nightmare where more food will cause their population to explode until the average individual is no better off, then collapse through starvation when the human doing the feeding moves away.
- They might ordinarily pass knowledge between generations through imitation, so changing their behavior through feeding might cause important behaviors to be lost between generations.
However, it’s looking like we might be just a few years away from some kind of singularity, and so it occurs to me that those reasons might not hold the water they once did. There seems to be a chance that wild animals could now enjoy the short-term benefit of being fed without suffering the long-term consequences- either because a well-aligned ASI could help humanely manage their population or because they, like us, are bound for an existential catastrophe.
Granted, there’s still the objection that wild animals losing their fear is dangerous in the short term (particularly in the extremely rare case of a rabies infection), though it seems like that could be avoided just by only leaving food out when they aren’t present.
We do also have to account for the possibility that we’re very wrong about the future rate of progress, and this doesn’t address the concern that more wild animals are a nuisance in cities. Still, a potential opportunity to be kind to animals we haven’t been able to be kind to in the past does strike me as valuable enough to be worth some risks.
So, what do LW people think: would it be morally correct to leave out enough food for both the cat and the raccoons?
Outside of the specific example, and I’m not sure if you meant it this way, but I would caution against using “the world as we know it might end soon” as a reason to make decisions that would be bad if the world somehow stayed mostly normal.
To the specific example, I would search (or ask an LLM) for expert sources on raccoon behavior and welfare, and run with their conclusions.
I am reminded of the old joke about Newton[1] cutting a large hole in his door for the mama cat and a few small holes for each of the kittens.
I guess in principle, it might be possible to glut your yard with enough food to satiate all the neighborhood raccoons, but I expect that’ll take vastly more food than you imagine, and to come with a host of new problems. Instead consider deploying some kind of cat-specific elevated feeding station – it looks lots of people like cats enough to have thoroughly solved precisely the problem you’re encountering.
Obviously apocryphally.
Putting aside the singularity bit, compare your beliefs about the following:
1) How long you’re likely to continue putting out food.
2) The amount of food you’re going to put out in terms of “racoon daily calorie consumption equivalents”
3) How happy it makes a racoon to live on (roughly) free food
4) How much it sucks to starve to death as an infant racoon
5) How much it sucks to die as an adult racoon
6) How much it sucks to be a (by whatever farming method X) meat animal.
7) How much moral damage is done by the deforestation or land development required for meat produced by method X.
3,4,6,7 are approximately the costs and benefits that you incur for continuing your feeding.
5 is the cost of shutting down your feeding at any point
1 tells you the ratio of continuation and starting costs, and 2 is a scaling factor.
I greatly enjoy feeding ducks in my local park, so I am biased, but to me the reasons for not feeding them have never quite held up. (although of course they should be fed food appropriate for their digestive system). Specifically on the Malthusian trap, it seems that I either don’t feed the wild animal and it dies from starvation, or I feed it, it reproduces and then its offspring dies from starvation, which is neutral in terms of animals dying from starvation at least within that species.