The Argument For Agnosticism

The simple truth is we just don't really know, as detailed in this post. The main arguments:

• Animals who die very young could experience many different states which outweigh death and other painful experiences, such as social contact, eating, mating, resting comfortably, playing, exploring, perceiving vistas or sounds or smells that they like.
• One of the main symptoms in cases of human diepression is a lack of motivation and an unwillingness to move. For an animal needing to acquire food and other things necessary to live, this could mean death. So for evolutionary reasons it would be logical for the baseline experience of animals to be "at least slightly positive" (and I would argue, at least not horrible). It is plausible that just being alive, perceiving, exploring, and experiencing the world, could itself bring happiness to animals.
• Some studies on animals suggest that extreme fear can trigger opioid mediated analgesia in animals, temporarily reducing pain sensitivity during predation.

Most researchers and people working on wild animal suffering reduction, which I have spoken to, tend to agree we just don't know if suffering dominates nature.

I think the question of "nature's nature" is in many ways the deepest questions of all. Is the world, as we know it, full of negative experiences or positive experiences? we are not even close to an answer. Nevertheless, the imperative to help wild animals, even if their average life in not hell, is still huge, one of the biggest moral challenges humanity faces.