Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore… you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that’s a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses it partly: “If you only live a few weeks and then die painfully, probably you won’t have enough welfare during those few weeks to make up for the extreme badness of your death. This is the situation for almost every animal who has ever lived.” But I think he understates it here.
Most vertebrates are larval fish. 99%+ of fish larvae die within days. For a larval fish, being eaten by predators (about 75%, on average) is invariably the best outcome, because dying ofstarvation, temperature changes, or physiological failure (the other 25%) seems a lot worse.
When they do experiments by starving baby fish to death (your reminder that ethics review boards have a very peculiar definition of ethics), they find that most sardines born in a single spawning don’t even start exogenous feeding, and survive for a few days from existing energy reserves. I would speculate that much of this time is spent in a state of constant hunger stress, driven by an extremely high metabolism and increasing cortisol levels, and for the vast majority who cannot secure food, their few hours-days of existence probably look a lot more like a desperate struggle until they gradually weaken and lose energy before dying. This is partly because they were born too small to ever have a chance of exogenous feeding—like a premature human baby unable to suckle, most don’t have the suction force to consume plankton.
I don’t doubt that there might be some pleasure there to balance out the suffering, but it seems like a hard sell for most K-strategists.
Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore… you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that’s a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses it partly: “If you only live a few weeks and then die painfully, probably you won’t have enough welfare during those few weeks to make up for the extreme badness of your death. This is the situation for almost every animal who has ever lived.” But I think he understates it here.
Most vertebrates are larval fish. 99%+ of fish larvae die within days. For a larval fish, being eaten by predators (about 75%, on average) is invariably the best outcome, because dying of starvation, temperature changes, or physiological failure (the other 25%) seems a lot worse.
When they do experiments by starving baby fish to death (your reminder that ethics review boards have a very peculiar definition of ethics), they find that most sardines born in a single spawning don’t even start exogenous feeding, and survive for a few days from existing energy reserves. I would speculate that much of this time is spent in a state of constant hunger stress, driven by an extremely high metabolism and increasing cortisol levels, and for the vast majority who cannot secure food, their few hours-days of existence probably look a lot more like a desperate struggle until they gradually weaken and lose energy before dying. This is partly because they were born too small to ever have a chance of exogenous feeding—like a premature human baby unable to suckle, most don’t have the suction force to consume plankton.
I don’t doubt that there might be some pleasure there to balance out the suffering, but it seems like a hard sell for most K-strategists.