Biases That Incline Us to Neglect the Situation of Wild Animals

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume X, p. 18 of the PDF edition · English translation

2.1. Introduction

The situation of wild animals as a result of natural processes is one of the situations with the largest number of victims. Even the figures for animal exploitation, which are already gigantic, almost disappear by comparison.

Curiously, despite this, the issue is highly neglected, including by most animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics, who have so far focused almost exclusively on the situation of exploited animals.

Of course, many people neglect the situation of wild animals simply because they do not know how serious it is. Others do not know that there are many things that can be done to make this situation less bad and that much more could be done in the future. However, there are other people who know how serious the situation is, and know that it is tractable, but do not consider it an important problem. Others go so far as to take a strong stand against trying to make this situation less bad.

In Volume VII of this collection we discussed the main objections to the proposal to help wild animals and saw how they can be answered. In this chapter we will address the cognitive biases that may incline us to neglect this issue or to oppose the proposal to help wild animals¹⁸.

2.2. Biases related to the status quo

As noted by Vinding (2020a), we tend to accept the opinions of our peers. It is rare for people to think critically and independently. Thus, if not only people in general but also most people concerned about animals (including activists and authors we admire) focus on the situation of exploited animals, we will be inclined to do the same, even if this is not the focus we would choose after careful reflection.

2.3. Biases related to the kind of animal most affected

One of the reasons why most people neglect the situation of wild animals is simply the fact that the victims are not human. Thus, anthropocentric speciesism has a fundamental influence on this neglect.

However, this does not explain the neglect of this issue by animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics. Another possible explanation for the neglect in this case has to do with the kind of nonhuman animal that is typically affected. The vast majority of mammals are small rodents. The vast majority of vertebrates are fish. And the overwhelming majority of animals are invertebrates. Given the way population dynamics work, these are the kinds of animals most harmed by natural processes.

There are at least three tendencies that contribute strongly to the neglect of the suffering and deaths of these animals, which we have already examined in detail in section 1.3: animals that are small, that are considered unintelligent, or that arouse less empathy in us usually receive little (or even no) consideration.

In the case of invertebrates (such as insects and crustaceans) and fish, these biases contribute jointly to the neglect of their situation, since they are usually small animals, seen as unintelligent, and generally do not arouse empathy in the way mammals do, for example. These animals are the overwhelming majority not only among exploited animals, but also the overwhelming majority in the wild.

2.4. Biases related to the number of victims

Animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics commonly cite the immense number of victims as one of the main reasons for focusing on animals exploited for food. However, the same reason (the number of victims) shows how important the situation of animals in the wild is. The number of animals in the wild, compared to the number of animals in exploitation, is so much greater that, to visualize the difference in size, it helps to draw an analogy with the span of a year. If we draw this analogy, the sum of the populations of animals in exploitation at a given moment would represent at most 14 seconds of the year. The entire rest of the year (334 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 46 seconds) would be the animals in the wild. This gives us a rough sense of how large the number of animals in the wild is.

Something that may seem puzzling at first glance is that the very fact that there is a gigantic number of victims may be one of the factors that inclines people to neglect this problem. This is due to two biases: the collapse of compassion and scope neglect, explained below.

2.4.1. The collapse of compassion

As we saw in section 1.4.1, the identifiable victim effect is our tendency to feel greater empathy and a desire to help in situations in which tragedies befall identifiable individuals, compared to situations in which the victims are a larger and vaguer group of individuals.

In short, with regard to situations involving gigantic numbers of victims, people tend not to feel the empathy they feel when they see individual cases of suffering. This is why campaigns that focus on individual cases tend to attract much more attention than those that focus on situations with a gigantic number of victims.

The bias that gives rise to the identifiable victim effect is known as the collapse of compassion, which is the tendency to behave more compassionately toward a small number of identifiable victims than toward a large number of anonymous victims.

2.4.2. Scope neglect

As we saw in section 1.4.2, another bias that can push in this direction is scope neglect, also known as scope insensitivity. This bias consists in failing to perceive the difference in size between two quantities when comparing them. This happens especially when the quantities being compared are very large.

For example, the world population at any given moment of animals raised as stock to be exploited²⁰ consists of land vertebrates (24 billion), fish (180 billion), and crustaceans such as shrimp (230 billion). Adding these numbers together gives a figure of 434 billion individuals. The total population of sentient animals in the wild at any given moment, by contrast, would be, according to certain estimates, between 1 and 10 quintillion individuals²¹. Scope neglect can lead us to think that the number of animals in the wild is only slightly greater than the number of exploited animals. In reality, for each animal raised as stock to be exploited there would be 2.3 to 23 million animals in the wild.

2.5. Biases that induce the belief that the situation of wild animals is good

2.5.1. The availability heuristic

Heuristics are mental shortcuts. They are generalizations or rules of thumb that reduce cognitive load. They can be effective for making snap judgments, but very often they lead to mistaken conclusions.

For example, the availability heuristic²² leads us to think that the cases we remember most easily are necessarily the most common or the most representative cases of that type of situation. This bias has strongly affected people's perception of the situation of animals in the wild. We will see more about this below.

What we remember most easily has a great deal to do with the information we receive (for example, from social media or the internet in general, television, magazines, documentaries, movies, newspapers, etc.). We tend to think that these cases are representative of most cases of that type simply because they are the cases that immediately come to mind when we think about the situations in question.

For example, when people think of atrocities against animals, they tend to think of atrocities against dogs and cats, which are the cases usually reported in the news. When they think of

animals exploited for consumption, they tend to think of mammals and birds, even though more than 99% of the animals exploited for consumption are crustaceans, fish, and insects. In this case, people remember mammals and birds because they are the animals activists usually mention, which in turn may be influenced by the fact that classic books in the field of animal ethics have focused on these animals. Similarly, when people think of animals in the wild, they tend to think of large, adult animals, since these are the wild animals that usually appear in magazines, documentaries, and movies on the subject.

This picture is not at all representative of the typical life of animals in the wild. The vast majority of animals in the wild are small animals, and the vast majority of those who come into existence die while they are still young. The fact that people think of adult, large animals when they think of animals in the wild contributes to their having no idea that the vast majority of animals born in the wild experience predominantly suffering and die prematurely. This will be explained in more detail below.

The way population dynamics work is one of the key factors behind the abundance of suffering and premature death for animals in the wild. The vast majority of animal species reproduce by maximizing the number of offspring, with clutches or litters ranging from thousands to many millions, depending on the species. If a population in a certain place has remained roughly constant over a few generations, we can infer that, on average, only one offspring per adult has survived to adulthood (otherwise we would see the population increase). This means that, in stable populations, on average only two young survive from each brood (one per adult), and fewer than that if there are adults who reproduce more than once in their lives. In fact, the vast majority of animals born in such broods come into existence almost only (and, in many cases, only) to experience the suffering that comes with a highly premature death, with very few experiences (or even no experiences at all) other than extreme suffering. The reproductive potential of these animals is so gigantic that it makes even the figures for animal exploitation almost disappear by comparison.

Large animals, however, do not reproduce in this way: they have few offspring at a time, which increases the possibilities for parental care and, with it, the chances that the young will escape death before sexual maturity, as well as the chances of having positive experiences. As we have seen, when people think of animals in the wild, they tend to think of adult, large animals. That is, they think precisely of that "minority within the minority" who escaped premature mortality, and who are the exception to the exception, not the norm, of life for animals in the wild.

Thus, since these are the animals people immediately recall when they think of animals in the wild, the availability heuristic may lead them to think that this is the typical life of animals in the wild, and to think that suffering does not predominate in the lives of animals in the wild, or that the number of animals born into lives full of suffering is small. As we have seen, the reality is exactly the opposite.

Moreover, as noted by Vinding (2020a), images of the suffering of farmed animals make up almost all of the disturbing images we see of animal suffering. The great majority of the content found and disseminated by activists shows cows, pigs, and chickens suffering at human hands. The author concludes that the priorities of the animal advocacy movement would probably be different if more than 99% of the horrific images found by activists showed the suffering of wild animals (which would be a proportion closer to the actual number of wild animals relative to exploited ones).

2.5.2. Biases with effects similar to the availability heuristic

Other biases with effects similar to those of the availability heuristic, which may contribute to the belief that the situation of animals in the wild is not so serious, are the following.

The base rate fallacy is the tendency to ignore general information and focus only on the information about a specific case, and to draw general conclusions from the specific case²³. For example, someone sees a scene of a bear playing happily (a particular case) and concludes: "animals living in the wild are generally doing well." This is an example of the base rate fallacy, since it focuses on a striking but unrepresentative particular case and ignores the

base rate (namely, the fact that the vast majority of animals in the wild live lives full of suffering).

Survivorship bias²⁴ occurs when a successful subgroup is mistaken for the whole group because the unsuccessful subgroup is invisible. In the case at hand, it consists in noticing the animals in the wild who survived and ignoring those who did not. Since the overwhelming majority of animals in the wild die very prematurely and soon vanish from the environment (because, for example, they are eaten by other animals²⁵), this can create the illusion that the vast majority of animals in the wild do not die prematurely, precisely because what we are able to see is the tiny minority who survived.

Frequency illusion. Once something has been noticed, every occurrence of that thing will be noticed, leading to the mistaken belief that it necessarily has a high frequency of occurrence (it is a form of selection bias). Thus, if people notice only the animals who survive, they may have the illusion that most animals survive.

Salience bias. The tendency to focus on items that are more emotionally striking and to ignore those that are not, even if this difference is irrelevant by objective standards.

Bizarreness effect. Bizarre material is remembered better than common material. For example, if someone dies in a very unusual way, this is reported in the media. But if someone dies of cancer, for example, this will not be reported in the media, precisely because it is something very common. This can make people forget that the common cases happen. The suffering and premature deaths of animals in the wild are such common occurrences that they are never reported in the media. The same happens with animal exploitation. When atrocities against animals make the news, it is because something very unusual has happened, something different from already institutionalized animal exploitation. This can create the illusion that the occurrences that are the norm do not occur (since they occur so frequently that they are no longer noticed) and that the unusual cases are the most representative (or even the entirety) of the cases in which animals suffer and die.

2.5.3. Biases that induce a romanticized view of life in the wild

The following biases may lead people to have an overly optimistic view of the way natural processes affect animals in the wild:

Rosy retrospection²⁶: remembering the past as better than it really was.

Declinism: the tendency to view the past in an overly positive light and the present or future in an overly negative light.

Although these biases are generally studied in terms of how individuals remember their own past, a similar attitude may incline people to have a romanticized view of what life in the wild is like, because they think that before human intervention things were good for animals.

Of course, human practices often cause even more suffering and death for animals. However, once we understand how natural processes typically affect animals, especially population dynamics, and that this was the case since long before the appearance of the human species, we can clearly see that the idea that things are naturally good for animals is an illusion.

The romanticized view of the lives of animals in the wild is widespread. Usually, the first information we receive, from childhood on, reflects this view. This may contribute to our holding on to the romanticized view of the lives of animals in the wild throughout our lives and resisting accepting that it is false, largely because of anchoring bias:

Anchoring bias causes us to rely heavily on the first piece of information we receive about a subject (the anchor). We interpret subsequent information in light of this anchor, instead of seeing it objectively²⁷. This can distort our judgment and prevent us from updating our beliefs.

At other times, the romanticized view of life in the wild arises simply from mistaken inferences. Consider the following example: "most human practices harm animals; therefore, most natural processes benefit them." This is an example of the false dichotomy fallacy, since it assumes that if the outcome of human practices is predominantly negative, then the outcome of natural processes must be predominantly positive, ignoring the fact that both may be predominantly negative.

Something that may give rise to the tendency toward false dichotomy is Manichean thinking, which consists in the tendency to see the world in terms of opposite poles and to associate one of them with good and the other with evil, without nuance and without seeing the possibility of positive and negative aspects on both sides. This bias makes it easier to accept false dichotomies such as “if humans are bad for animals, then nature must be good for them.”

Another is moral compensation bias²⁸, which is the tendency to think that there is a moral balance in the world: if there is an agent who causes harm, then there must be another who offsets that harm by bringing about benefits. This bias can lead to the intuitive (but unjustified) assumption that natural processes “repair” or “balance out” the harms caused by humans.

2.6. Biases that lead us to try to justify the suffering of wild animals

Unlike the biases that may induce the belief that the situation of wild animals is good, there are others that may lead even people who recognize that the situation of wild animals is very bad to try to justify it. Below are some examples.

2.6.1. Appeal to agency

Consider the following biases:

Agent detection bias: the tendency to presume the intentional intervention of an agent in situations that may not involve an agent.

Teleological bias: the tendency to attribute purpose to entities and events that did not arise from goal-directed action.

These biases may incline people to think that, behind natural processes, there is some agent who wants this situation to happen.

Note, however, that these two biases alone are not enough to give rise to the belief that we should not reduce this suffering, since they only lead us to suppose that there is an agent behind natural processes, but do not lead us to think that it must be a very intelligent, wise, or benevolent agent, nor that this suffering is the only way to avoid an even greater evil. These are additional assumptions, since even if there were an agent, it could be an indifferent agent, or a benevolent agent without much power or knowledge about how to avoid evil, or else a malevolent agent with a great deal of knowledge about how to maximize suffering and a great deal of power to do so, and so on.

Thus, a third bias that probably contributes to this view is the following:

Just-world hypothesis²⁹: refers to the belief that the world is just. This bias may incline us, for example, to believe that whoever is suffering a harm must have deserved it.

Broadly speaking, these biases together lead to the belief that nature is the creation of a supremely good and wise deity (or that nature itself is that deity), and that what we should do, then, is revere it, since everything is "in its proper place."

Who bears the burden of proof?

A proponent of this view might object that we have not proven either that it is impossible for there to be a justification for all the suffering and death resulting from natural processes. However, the burden of proof lies with whoever believes there is such a justification. Below we will see why.

Imagine that someone claimed that we should not put out the flames of a fire because, somehow, that fire, despite the suffering and death it causes, is the only way to prevent a much worse evil. It would be up to the person making this claim to show that this is the case.

The same holds for anyone who claims that this is the case with regard to the suffering and death resulting from natural processes. However, if the person making this claim cannot even think of how this could be possible (and merely says it is not impossible), then they offer no reason at all for us to think this might be the case. So we have every reason to think that we should prevent this suffering and these deaths as much as we can.

Broadly speaking, the principle is this: something's being negative is already, in itself, a reason to prevent/minimize it. Therefore, the burden of proof always lies with whoever claims that something negative should not be prevented/minimized.

2.6.2. Omission bias and perpetrator bias

Omission bias³⁰ is the tendency to judge harmful omissions as less wrong than equally harmful acts. When this tendency is more extreme, in comparing a given harmful act with a given harmful omission, the omission is judged less wrong even if it is more harmful (even much more harmful) than the act. In the most extreme possible cases of this tendency, it is judged that we have no duty whatsoever regarding omissions, however harmful they may be.

The point is this: the vast majority of people suffer from this bias, often at this most extreme possible level. For example, people frequently try to justify neglecting the suffering of wild animals that results from natural processes by claiming that we are not morally responsible for our omissions³¹.

Animal advocates are not immune to this bias. Quite the contrary. This line of argument frequently comes from animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics,

who maintain that we should be concerned only with the harms that result from human action.

However, even in the case of animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics, omission bias is often subordinate to anthropocentrism, since they usually do not maintain that we have no obligation to help humans when what harms them is natural processes (much less would they say that it is wrong to help). This shows that anthropocentric speciesism is strongly present even among animal activists and authors in the field of animal ethics.

As noted by Vinding (2020a), omission bias may be rooted in perpetrator bias³², which is the tendency to care more about suffering that is intentionally caused. Seeing an animal suffer at human hands tends to produce outrage, since it is very clear that the suffering occurred because of the decision of an agent who could have avoided it. By contrast, seeing an animal suffer from natural causes may lead people to lament the situation, but it usually does not produce the same outrage, since the suffering was not caused by an agent intending to produce it. However, although the harm did not originate in an agent's decision, if it is possible to help, the fact that the harm continues is the result of omission, because agents choose not to help. Therefore, there are exactly the same reasons to feel outrage. But since omission is not as apparent as an act, we tend not to notice this.

2.7. Biases that incline us to doubt the feasibility of helping wild animals

One of the main objections to the proposal to help wild animals is the claim that the problem is intractable (or at least that its tractability is very low)³³. As noted by Vinding (2020a), there are several reasons why this belief is false:

(1) We already make countless decisions that affect wild animals. Thus, environmental policies could be adapted so as to have the goal of reducing the suffering of animals, instead of being guided by environmentalist values.

(2) There are several interventions that have been carried out for a long time and that significantly help animals in the wild.

(3) The scope of these interventions could be expanded over time, with the development of fields such as welfare biology, for example.

(4) We can help indirectly, by arguing against speciesism and in favor of the importance of researching how to help wild animals.

Some people believe there is no way to have a significant impact in helping wild animals because they are unaware of this information. However, there are people who know this information but maintain that belief because of the influence of certain biases. Below are examples of two such biases that may influence that belief.

2.7.1. Proportion bias

Proportion bias inclines us to measure the effectiveness of an intervention in terms of what percentage of the total problem its outcome represents, and to neglect the actual amount of benefit produced.

For example, this bias may incline someone to think that it is better to use a certain resource to help 10 victims of a problem with 100 victims (since that is 10%) than to use the same resource to help 100 victims of a problem with 2,000 victims (since that is 5%). In this case, the person would help 10 times fewer victims while thinking they were helping twice as many (or, worse, knowing that they are helping 10 times fewer!).

This bias is especially relevant in the context of wild animal suffering, given the enormous scale on which it occurs. For example, one objection to the proposal to help wild animals says that, even if we could help them in an enormous number of cases, doing so would not be an efficient use of our resources, since, given the astronomical number of victims, even if we helped trillions of them, this would still represent a small fraction of the total. According to this objection, we should focus on exploited animals, since the percentage of the problem we could solve would be greater³⁴.

Proportion bias can lead us to waste, on a large scale, resources that could save many victims. For example, imagine that with the same amount of resources we could either help 90% of the animals in problem A, or help to the same extent 0.1% of the animals in problem B (all of whom are in a situation as bad as that of the animals in problem A). If we are guided by proportion, we will choose to solve 90% of problem A. But suppose that problem A involves a trillion animals and problem B involves a quadrillion animals. Remember that 90% of a trillion is 900 billion, and that 0.1% of a quadrillion is a trillion. If we are guided by proportion, we will be helping 100 billion fewer animals.

2.7.2. Temporal bias

Temporal bias inclines us to give less importance to each moment the further away it is from the present moment, leading to a disregard for the long-term impact of our decisions, including our activist strategies³⁵.

This bias inclines us to take a short-sighted view and to think that if something is not possible at the moment, it will never be possible. Worse still, it may incline us to think that something beneficial should not be done merely because its positive effects would occur in the long term, rather than now or in the near future.

There are many things already being done now to help wild animals. In fact, many of them have been done for a long time. However, much more could be done in the long term, if there are enough incentives for research. Temporal bias may be one of the factors that lead to the belief that this kind of investment is not worth attempting.

2.8. Biases that incline us to underestimate the public's receptiveness

2.8.1. Bubble bias

Animal activists commonly argue that the general public will not accept the proposal to help wild animals because most of the public is not vegan. They say something like: "if not even vegans accept helping wild animals, and if people do not even accept veganism, how could they accept helping wild animals?"

The false consensus effect occurs when individuals overestimate how much other people will share their beliefs, values, and behaviors. It leads people to project their personal attitudes and ideas onto others. As we will see below, this bias, together with the availability heuristic, may underlie the idea that the public is unlikely to accept the proposal to help wild animals.

As we saw in section 2.5.1, the availability heuristic is the bias that leads us to think that the cases we remember most easily are necessarily the most representative. Since the cases that immediately come to these activists' minds are their own opinions and those of vegans about helping wild animals (and a large share of them oppose such help), they may have a mistaken impression of what most people think about helping animals in the wild.

Of course, the false consensus effect and the availability heuristic may also incline those who are in favor of helping wild animals to think that most of the public will be in favor as well. This, too, is a risk. However, the fact that most of the public is not vegan and that many vegans do not accept the proposal to help wild animals does not show that most of the public will tend to reject the proposal to help wild animals. We will see why below.

Several mistaken beliefs underlie the idea that the general public will reject the proposal to help wild animals. First, it is a mistake to think that, in order to accept the proposal to help wild animals, one must be vegan (or that vegans are more likely to accept it than non-vegans).

As noted by Vinding (2020a), most people may be much more resistant to veganism than to the proposal to help wild animals. This is because veganism asks them to change a behavior in which they have already invested a great deal and continue to invest every day. There would be nothing equivalent, however, regarding the proposal to help wild animals. In this case, people would not have to change a behavior in which they have already invested. In fact, in their personal lives, they would have to change almost nothing. They would only have to take a stand in favor of helping wild animals³⁶.

Similarly, it is possible that people who call themselves vegan are more resistant to the proposal to help wild animals than the general population. For example, although consideration for animals and environmentalism start from opposing ideals, many people who consider themselves vegan do not perceive this difference and tend to be more environmentalist than the general population, valuing ideals such as keeping nature free from human intervention, even when this is extremely harmful to animals. For this reason, they may tend to reject the proposal to help wild animals more strongly than the general population³⁷. Moreover, since opposing intervention in nature is a behavior in which many of these vegans have already invested, they may be more inclined than the general population to resist changing it.

In short, if we make hasty generalizations from vegans' position on the proposal to help wild animals, we may be underestimating the likelihood that the general public will accept this proposal.

2.8.2. Bubble bias or rationalization?

We must also take into account the possibility that, in many cases, the claim that "there is no point in promoting the proposal to help wild animals because nobody is going to care about it anyway" is a rationalization, and not the real reason why the person believes we should not promote the proposal to help wild animals.

For example, it may be that the person, despite saying they agree with the proposal to help wild animals, actually disagrees and says "there is no point in promoting it, because nobody is going to care about it" as an attempt to persuade the people they are talking to to give up the idea. In fact, the person's real fear may be that, if we promote this proposal, many people will come to care about something they do not want people to care about. So, although they say "there is no point in promoting it because nobody is going to care," perhaps their real fear is "if it is promoted, a lot of people may come to care"³⁸.

2.9. Conclusion

Above, we have looked at several biases that can influence people's perception of the issue of wild animal suffering.

As noted by Vinding (2020a), these biases can influence even those people who have already noticed them, since "the core programming of our moral cognition does not change instantly." Constant vigilance is therefore necessary.

Some research suggests that, for some biases, the mere fact of becoming aware of their existence already helps reduce their influence³⁹. For other biases, however, this is not enough⁴⁰.

In any case, a central difficulty in trying to reduce the influence of biases is that they are rooted in our cognition and are therefore intuitions, and generate strong feelings. By contrast, the realization that beliefs resulting from biases are mistaken does not, at least at first, produce a similar sensation. In this case, it is as if intellectual conclusions were not yet rooted in the form of feelings, intuitions, and heuristics. However, one reason why this is so is that these conclusions are new. Perhaps, with practice, they too can become second nature.

This is in line with what Aristotle said about the virtues⁴¹. Virtues are developed over time, through habitual repetition, until they become second nature. This is usually discussed in terms of moral virtues. However, it applies equally to epistemic virtues, which include trying to reduce the influence of biases. Thus, constant practice seems essential for succeeding in overcoming (or at least reducing the influence of) biases, whether moral or cognitive.