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Thomas comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong
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What is more precious - the tigers of India, or lives of all the people eaten every year by the tigers of India?
A bit of quick Googling suggests that there are around 1500 tigers in India, and about 150 human deaths by tiger attack every year (that's the estimate for the Sundarbans region alone, but my impression is that tiger attack deaths outside the Sundarbans are negligible in comparison). Given those numbers, I would say that if the only way to prevent those deaths was to eliminate the tiger population and there wouldn't be any dire ecological consequences to the extinction, then I would support the elimination of the tiger population. But in actual fact, I am sure there are a number of ways to prevent most of those deaths without driving tigers to extinction, so the comparison of their relative values is a little bit pointless.
Ways as easy as sending a bunch of guys with rifles into the jungle?
You could legalize eating tiger. This will prevent tiger extinction in the same way it prevented cow extinction, result in sending some guys with rifles into the jungle that you don't even pay for, and if that's not enough, you can still send guys with rifles to finish off the wild population, and they still will be less likely to go extinct than if you do nothing.
There are lots of reasons why farming cows is significantly easier than farming tigers.
Tiger meat would be much more expensive than beef, but there's still enough of a market for it to keep tigers from going extinct.
Not all animals can be domesticated for meat production. Jared Diamond discusses the question in "Guns, Germs and Steel". He calls it the Anna Karenina principle, and some of the factors influencing this are:
All of those just increase the cost; certainly they can make things infeasible for hunter-gatherers with per capita incomes of maybe $300 a year generously. But they are of little interest to people with per capitas closer to $30,000 and who are willing to pay for tiger meat.
Sharks are legal to eat and this is a major factor in their current risk of extinction.
Isn't extinction risk the goal here? (Not extinction per se, but population reduction down to the level it is no longer a threat. At least in this hypothetical.)
Sharks are not similar to tigers in that you can't (with current technology?) keep some types of them alive in captivity, but tigers you can. Legalizing eating tiger meat, though, without also legalizing tiger ranches (?) would not be of help in preventing extinction.
Sharks are hard to farm, in that they have all the problems tigers have, but you also have to do it underwater. I also think sharks aren't as in demand as tigers. I've heard tiger meat is a popular snake oil. Or at least stuff that claims to contain tiger meat is.
In Australia, fish'n'chips is almost certainly shark.
Tiger parts have a variety of uses in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Making harvesting these parts from farmed tigers would be a somewhat efficacious solution.
The effort involved is not the only cost. Tigers are sentient beings capable of suffering. Their lives have value. Plus there is value associated with the existence of the species. The extinction of the Bengal tiger in the wild would be a tragedy, and not just because of all the trouble those guys with guns would have to go to.
While I would agree that their lives have value, it's not clear that it's positive value. Life in the wild is not like life in civilization. It sucks.
Also, the value of the lives they influence will most likely be more important than their lives. They eat other animals on a regular basis.
Life in the wild being what it is as opposed to what it could be is a tragedy. Life in the wild existing at all may well be a tragedy. Perhaps what we really ought to do is just burn down the wild, and make that way of life end.
Also, tigers are presumably having some ecological effect, so there might be costs to a tigerless region.
Surely a more obvious cost is the vast number of people who like tigers and would be sad if they all died?
Eh, I bet most of them would get over it pretty quick. Also, I'm not a utilitarian.
insofar as we can preserve tigers as a species in zoos or with genetic materials I'd say the people are more valuable, but if killing these tigers wiped out the species, they're worth more.
What about 1,500 people, instead of 150? 15,000? 150,000?
I haven't done the math. 1,500 people feels like a line, 15,000 people feels like enough.
Wow, those are some hugely divergent preferences from mine. I'm pretty sure I would trade the lives of all the remaining tigers in India to keep my family alive. I'll have to update what I expect human-CEV to look like (given that are preferences are likely much closer than that of a randomly selected person [since we had to pass through many filters to end up on this web forum]).
Id trade a lot more random humans for my family than I would for tigers.
Depends on your utility function. There is nothing inherently precious about either. Although by my value system it is the humans.