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NancyLebovitz comments on Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion - Less Wrong
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It looks better, of course. The defenders of wild-animal pessimism usually point to r vs. K selection strategies, population dynamics and the relative asymmetry between peak sufferings and peak pleasures. Some of them are also negative or negative-leaning utilitarians.
But let's say you value animal pleasure and want to maximize it. Even then, there should be only a relatively small margin where untouched nature is most efficient (when it overlaps with other interests, such as political concessions to deep ecologists, ecosystem services, aesthetics and tourism etc.)
Because if someone really wanted to maximize pleasure, they would try to be more efficient at it.
If someone wants to maximize nonhuman animal pleasure, they could set up a foundation to breed the perfect pleasure animal - which could never survive in the wild - and then give it existence donations.
This is true for other values as well: Some say they value biodiversity - but none of them has suggested to set up a foundation for rapid artificial speciation + existence donations to a small number of individuals per new species. Instead they have associations of lush forests and beautiful wild megafauna in their heads.
Most humans don't actually try to maximize X, for any formal definition of X. They are scope insensitive by default, and come with a background of memes and associations that often are carried from early childhood onward.
What do you do if you want to maximize wild animal pleasure at something resembling current levels of technology?
First, I would question if it's the most effective thing (on the margin) someone could to to maximize pleasure. If not, prioritize other things.
Second, I would question whether the suffering outweighs the pleasure in wild animals. Reasonable activities here could be research and awareness raising.
Finally, there's a level of activities many professions are already engaged in, such as maintaining and monitoring deer populations when their natural predators have been displaced by humans, or welfare-related activities in dedicated wildlife parks. Other ideas are vaccinations for some wild animals, or research into softer ways to control wild animal populations, e.g. affordable depot contraceptives. David Pearce has even suggested a welfare state for elephants. I think costs are a limiting factor here.
I personally am pessimistic that suffering causes like live predation can be outweighed by wild animal pleasure; I think it would probably be easier to make human lives better (e.g. better painkillers) and more humane (better vegan food), and then make more of them. Or just make happier domesticated animals. But I'm sure if you're looking you'll find something of value. I'd also keep an eye on Animal Ethics
Shoot poachers. ETA: and pool together subspecies (like some rhino subspecies) which in isolation will certainly go extinct, since there's not really any point in them suffering without company and probably a hope of cross-breeding. There was a story about European/American bison crosses that were later all killed to prevent 'genotype pollution', but from the poi t of view of minimazing suffering it always striked me as stupid.
Also, bees and some related species experience a decline nowadays; it is not technologically impossible to plant most suitable plants to support their existence (instead of just importing the most fashionable species.)
But as long as about 20 people out of 1000 would swerve to make a snake completely flat, I would continue to think that the highest returns here can be obtained only through strict prohibition. Think of Madagascar. Heck, a party of 500 salamanders dried out within hours of confiscation in the Boryspil aeroport once, because there is not even a room to keep confiscated animals! Many animals are too stressed by capture to survive transportation, which is why 'to raise a reptile' means for experienced batrachologists 'to keep it alive until you obtain F2 of it', for example (here I mean my own biology teacher.)
Or, you can make 3D images of animals to replace all those zoo sufferers...
(I also agree with that downvote. I should have thought past my knee-jerk reaction.)