I think it’s not clear at all that the average animal in the wild has a life of net negative utility, nor do I think it’s clear that the average present-day human has a life of net positive utility.
If you compare the two, wild animals probably have more gruesome deaths and starve more, but most of the time they might be happier than the average human since they live in an environment they evolved to live in.
especially for the vast majority of animals who give birth to thousands of young of which on average only 2 will ever reach adulthood
Most animals to which this applies probably don’t have the cognitive capacity to be upset by this. It just means that in those species, the vast majority of lives are short and end by being eaten by some other animal. From a human perspective this sounds terrible, but I don’t think it’s obvious at all that the net utility of these lives is negative (and I just mean the first person experience, not eco-system effects or anything like that).
I recently articulated similar ideas about motherly love. I don’t think it’s an example of successful alignment because evolution’s goals are aligned with the mother’s goals. In the example you give where a child loses their gonads at age 2, it would be an alignment failure if the mother continues devoting resources to the child. In reality that wouldn’t happen, because with motherly love, evolution created an imperfect intermediate goal that is generally but not always the same as the goal of spreading your genes.
I totally agree that motherly love is not a triumph of evolution aligning humans with its goals. But I think it’s a good example of robust alignment between the mother’s actions and the child’s interests that generalizes well to OOD environments.