Cameron Meyer Shorb making the case for wild animals and why we should care about their suffering.

How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Cameron is the executive director of Wild Animal Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of animals by accelerating the growth of wild animal welfare science.

In this episode Cameron helps us to understand the vast topic of wild animal suffering. Cameron makes the compelling case for why we should invest resources into understanding how we can reduce wild animal suffering responsibly with data-backed interventions, improving the overall well-being of wild animals.

We talk through the importance of Wild Animal Initiative’s research in this area, their grant-making arm which is enabling the research field in this area to grow and the future plans for their work.

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

• Wild Animal Initiative website
• Animal Ethics website
• Cricket Science Game and WAI's blog post explaining the project
• WAI blog post:
  • Core concepts of wild animal welfare suffering
  • Farmed and wild animal welfare
  • Past interventions future welfare applications
  • House sparrow research
• Join the WAI researcher community
• Twitter: @forwildanimals
• Heather Browning & Walter Veit: Positive wild animal welfare paper
  • Heather Browning talk on the above paper
• An Immense World by Ed Yong
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• WAI Newsletter sign up
• WAI Donate

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Chapters

1. Episode preview (00:00:00)

2. Intro (00:00:41)

3. An animal related view that Cameron changed his mind on recently (00:02:20)

4. Cameron's journey into animal advocacy (00:04:04)

5. What is wild animal welfare (00:12:33)

6. Why should we care about wild animal welfare (00:17:14)

7. The scale of the issue (00:19:25)

8. Thinking about interventions and potential harms (00:21:12)

9. Concrete recommendations (00:32:11)

10. Different classifications of wild animals (00:35:14)

11. Probabilities of wild animal suffering (00:38:33)

12. Main levers to impact wild animal welfare (00:40:39)

13. Positive experiences in wild animal's lives (00:42:44)

14. Reducing suffering vs improving welfare (00:44:41)

15. Intense short term pain vs chronic pain (00:49:56)

16. Challenges of doing research on welfare and suffering (00:52:23)

17. WAI services offer (00:55:02)

18. Examples of research WAI would support (00:58:57)

19. Sentience tradeoff (01:04:36)

20. Are wild animal welfare interventions compatible with their farmed animal counterparts (01:09:26)

21. What can advocates do about this (01:14:47)

22. WAI expansion plans (01:19:15)

23. Closing questions (01:22:02)