But Nature is Complex

The Consequences of Intervening are Unknown. Is that a reason to drop working to reduce wild animal suffering?

• Think about the hardship of street cats. Humans try to help them by reducing their population through spaying & neutering, even though these methods have consequences which are hard to quantify. Less cats could mean more birds. More birds could mean more insects that are killed by birds. This would affect hedgehogs and reptiles and many other animals in the streets in an unknown way. We still interfere because of an intuition and partial data, pertaining to particular species, that this is good for welfare and avoidance of kittens dying, albeit I haven't seen an analysis capable of quantifying the amount of suffering reduced or added by such an intervention.
• In nature, enormous numbers of animals are born and do not survive. There is not enough food and not enough resources for all of them, just as most street kittens die at a very young age. If through different techniques, we could prevent an animal from bringing 1000 offspring into the world, of whom only 2 would survive on average, and instead give birth to only two who will survive, we could potentially reduce suffering to a great extent.
• We are destroying natural habitats, splicing them by roads, hunting, etc. Until we stop doing that completely, if ever, regulation should be steered from a welfare biology perspective, not environmentalism.
• We should be very careful in intervening in nature. The people acting in this space also think so. This is why the space of reducing wild animal suffering and welfare biology is currently more focused on research, building it as an academic field, and focusing on some small well-thought-out interventions.