Objections That Question the Practicality of the Proposal to Help

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 72 of the PDF edition · English translation

25.1. The objection that it is not possible to help everyone in need

The number of animals in the wild is gigantic. According to some estimates, there are somewhere between 1 and 10 quintillion sentient individuals in the wild at any given moment⁷⁹. To get an idea of this number, if we make an analogy with the span of one year and compare it with the human population, the latter would represent at most 0.25 seconds of the year.

It is sometimes argued that it is pointless to help animals in the wild because, given the astronomical number of victims, we will never manage to help them all. However, this objection can easily be answered by pointing out that the impossibility of helping everyone neither prevents nor renders pointless helping in those cases where we can do so. For the animals we could help, our help would make all the difference.

Objections of this kind would never be taken seriously in the human context. Imagine, for example, a doctor refusing to save your life on the grounds that doing so would be pointless because it is impossible to help all the humans who need it. It is only because of the prevalence of speciesism that objections of this kind arise when nonhuman animals are the victims.

25.2. Should we prioritize problems of which we would solve a larger share?

There is another objection to the proposal to help wild animals which says that, even if we manage to help in an enormous number of cases, doing so would not be an efficient way of using our resources since, given the astronomical number of victims, even if we helped many of them, this would still represent a small fraction of the total. According to this objection, we should focus only on exploited animals, since the percentage of the problem we would be able to solve would be greater.

The main problem with this objection is that it makes the mistake of measuring efficiency in the use of resources by percentage, rather than by the actual amount of benefit we could produce. Let us look at an example to illustrate this point.

Let us 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 (who are all in a situation as bad as that of the animals in problem A).

If we are guided by proportion, we will choose to help 90% of the animals in problem A. But suppose that problem A involves one trillion animals, and problem B involves one quadrillion. 90% of one trillion is 900 billion. 0.1% of one quadrillion is one trillion. If we choose to solve 0.1% of problem B, we will be helping 100 billion more animals with the same amount of resources.

This reveals how mistaken it is to rely on percentage to measure efficiency in the use of resources. In the example above, if we are guided by percentage, we will fail to help 100 billion animals we could have helped. Therefore, to measure efficiency in the use of the resources we have for helping, what matters is the actual amount of benefit we could produce, not how many similar cases remain to be solved.

Thus, the fact that, even if we helped animals in the wild on a large scale, this could still represent a small percentage of the total number of victims of the problem does not show that doing so would not be an efficient way of using the resources available to us to reduce suffering. What would have to be assessed, among other things, is: (1) how large a benefit we could produce with the same amount of resources by investing in this or that problem; and (2) how neglected each problem is (since this reveals in which problems other people are likely to invest their resources anyway).

Taking these two factors into account, we can see that focusing on preventing wild animal suffering can be a very efficient way of preventing suffering in the world. For example, regarding the first factor, reducing the number of births in animal species that maximize the number of offspring would drastically reduce the number of individuals who would be born to lives full of suffering and a premature death. As we saw in Chapter 3, the reproductive potential of these animals is so gigantic that it exceeds the numbers of animal exploitation by several orders of magnitude. For example, sterilizing a single ocean sunfish would prevent at least 300 million animals from being born to this fate (and more than that if the sunfish in question would reproduce more than once in its lifetime). Carrying out an aid program of this kind does not seem to be more difficult than, for example, managing to shut down a factory farm (in fact, it may be much easier). As for the second factor, the issue of wild animal suffering is highly neglected, even by animal advocates.

All this shows that, far from it being pointless to focus on the issue of wild animal suffering, such a focus has great potential to be an extremely efficient way of preventing or minimizing suffering in the world.