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DanielLC comments on Open thread, September 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong
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In the effective animal altruism movement, I've heard a bit (on LW) about wild animal suffering- that is, since raised animals are vastly outnumbered by wild animals (who encounter a fair bit of suffering on a frequent basis), we should be more inclined to prevent wild suffering than worry about spreading vegetarianism.
That said, I think I've heard it sometimes as a reason (in itself!) not to worry about animal suffering at all, but has anyone tried to solve or come up with solutions for that problem? Where can I find those? Alternatively, are there more resources I can read on wild animal altruism in general?
There's not a whole lot we can do now, so one thing I've heard suggested is to spread vegetarianism so that people will be more sympathetic to animals in general, and when we have the ability to engineer some retrovirus to make them suffer less or something like that, we'll care more about helping animals than not playing god.
Another possibility: nuke the rainforests.
Vegetarianism as seeding empathy, interesting- where have you heard that idea brought up? (That is, was it a book or somewhere online I could see more on?) Mass genetic engineering was the 'solution' I was wondering about especially. (Obviously it's a little impractical at the moment.)
Nuking the rainforests doesn't seem like a good solution (aside from the obvious impacts on OUR wellbeing!) for the same reasons that nuking currently-suffering human populations doesn't seem like a good solution. Of course, you may have been joking.
I don't know exactly where I heard it, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere on felicifia.org.
I am somewhat skeptical of wild animal suffering being bad enough to necessitate nuking the rainforsts, but I think we should try to find out exactly how good their lives are. If their suffering really does significantly outweigh their happiness, then I don't see how we could justify not nuking them. If an animal is suffering and isn't likely to get better, you euthanize it. If this applies to all the animals, you euthanize all of them.