It’s easy for us to think of the natural world (without human intervention) as unambiguously positive: to imagine that wild animals live harmoniously with one another in a natural ‘balance.’

But advocates for wild animal welfare argue that this attitude ignores the huge amounts of suffering present in nature. Moreover, the large, healthy, adult vertebrates we usually picture (like foxes, songbirds, or lions) are a very small proportion of the overall wild animal population — almost all wild animals are actually juvenile¹ invertebrates.²

This means that the actual day-to-day lives of wild animals are pretty different to how we’d expect. Animal lives are mostly quite short — in some species, only one in millions of juveniles survive to adulthood¹ — and are filled with disease, parasitism, hunger, thirst, fear of predators, and suffering from heat or cold. Wild animals often die in very drawn-out, painful ways, and most die at a fraction of their possible lifespan.³

We can’t know for sure what it’s like to be a wild animal,⁴ but we can observe that many or even most wild animals live in conditions that would be considered extremely cruel to inflict on a human, or a domesticated animal.

Very little effort goes towards trying to reduce the suffering of wild animals, even within the broader field of animal welfare. There might be good reasons for this, as we’ll discuss below, but at present the field is extremely neglected.

But isn’t wild animal suffering natural?

Yes, it is. But something being natural doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good; for example, smallpox was natural, but it was good to eradicate it.

Working on wild animal welfare challenges this common mistake of equating the natural with the good. And this might even be itself a reason to work on it: maybe wild animal advocacy helps us make moral progress by expanding our moral circle, and potentially even setting a precedent for work on digital sentience, which may become a pressing issue in the future.

Is it possible to reduce wild animal suffering?

Wild animal welfare seems much less tractable than, for example, farmed animal welfare, where we’ve seen lots of wins recently and where humans are the unambiguous cause of the suffering. In the comparatively much newer and smaller field of wild animal welfare, it’s much less clear what exactly we should do.

There’s also a principled reason to think that wild animal welfare is less tractable: improving the lives of wild animal populations means intervening in some way in the ecosystems in which they live. However, it’s very hard to accurately predict the effects of our actions on ecosystems, because they’re so complicated. And there are historical examples of people making this kind of mistake.

One response could be that while we don’t know all the effects of our actions on ecosystems, we can always be cautious, monitor carefully, and only intervene in reversible ways.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that improving wild animal welfare isn’t wholly intractable, since it looks like wild animal welfare advocates have made promising progress in some areas.⁵ That said, it seems like the interventions we can be confident won’t do harm are currently limited. This may point to additional reasons to build this research field: because the area is so neglected, there might be many opportunities to discover more ways of reliably helping wild animals in the future.

Learn more about wild animal welfare

• WildAnimalSuffering.org, an accessible and visually appealing introduction to the topic
• Podcast: Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it
• Wild Animal Initiative, a wild animal welfare research organisation
• Animal Ethics, a think tank with some research on wild animal welfare
• Reducing Suffering, the blog of Brian Tomasik, who has been an early advocate for wild animal welfare
• Podcast: Marcus Davis on Rethink Priorities — which discusses Rethink Priorities’ recent research into wild animal suffering interventions

Relevant career reviews from us:

• Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
• Academic research
• Research management

Read next:  Explore other pressing world problems

Want to learn more about global issues we think are especially pressing? See our list of issues that are large in scale, solvable, and neglected, according to our research.

Continue →

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We’re looking for a new marketer to help us expand our readership and scale up our marketing channels.

We’d like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time as we expand our marketing team.

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, about 90% of US college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and we estimate that just 0.5% of students at top colleges are highly engaged in EA. As a marketer with 80,000 Hours, you would help us achieve our goal of reaching all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us grow our readership to 5–10 times its current size, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

We’re looking for a marketing generalist who will:

• Start managing (and eventually own) our two largest existing marketing channels:
  • Sponsorships with people who have large audiences, primarily on YouTube (influencer marketing).
  • Paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram (digital marketing).
• Take on management of some other existing marketing efforts, such as promoting The 80,000 Hours Podcast on podcast listening platforms, and managing the promotion of our book giveaway.
• Be responsible for evaluation and analytics of your marketing efforts, such as comparing conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and analysing the engagement levels of new readers.
• Write for and design relevant pages on our website, such as landing pages for marketing campaigns.

Depending on your background and interests, we might also like you to:

• Help us manage our Google Ads nonprofit grant, or expand into paid search and/or YouTube ads on the Google Ads platform.
• Work on conversion rate optimisation of the website, such as by running A/B tests on alternative calls to action.
• Expand into other paid digital advertisement platforms, such as on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, or Snap.
• Manage our social media accounts.
• Help the content team with search engine optimisation of our website content.

Your focus in this role will be on our existing channels to begin with (sponsorships and digital advertisements). However, we would be excited to support you towards eventually taking on more responsibility, including:

• Providing input on our marketing strategy — for example, generating ideas for major marketing initiatives, discussing which to pursue, and figuring out which metrics we should optimise to most effectively achieve our goals.
• Investigating and launching new marketing initiatives or partnerships as a primary decision maker.

Bella Forristal would be your manager. You would be the second marketer hired to the team, which we intend to grow rapidly.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next three years you might have:

• Cost-effectively deployed >$5 million reaching people from our target audience.
• Worked with some of the largest and most respected YouTube creators (for instance, we have existing contacts with Tom Scott, SciShow (Hank Green), and Wendover Productions).
• Managed Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns that reached tens of millions of people.
• Driven tens or hundreds of thousands of additional newsletter subscriptions, leading to hundreds or thousands of people changing to a more impactful career.
• Expanded your responsibility to include other marketing channels.

We’re looking for someone who has:

• A strong interest in effective altruism and longtermism, ideally with experience in EA strategy.
• An enthusiastic approach to the role; you’re excited about 80,000 Hours’ mission and growing our reach.
• Excellent written communication (in particular, you’re comfortable discussing decisions and uncertainties with the rest of the team in writing).
• An interest in thinking carefully about what will drive engagement with our work from people who might make especially high-impact career changes, and what this means for our marketing strategy.

Ideally, you’d also have the following traits — but we encourage you to apply even if they don’t describe you!

• Previous experience in marketing, especially influencer or digital marketing, or a related field (this might include things like product management, software engineering, data science, operations, or communications; or maybe you’ve worked on a side project that attracted a large number of users).

Since we are a nonprofit, and we aren’t selling a product, this is a fairly nontraditional marketing role. We’d therefore encourage you to apply, even if you aren’t otherwise looking for roles in marketing.

This is a full-time role. We would prefer for you to work in-person, based in London (we can support UK visa applications if needed). You can work remotely for up to three months of the year if needed.

The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but to give a rough sense, the starting salary for someone with no relevant prior experience would be approximately £58,000 per year; for someone with four years of relevant prior experience it would be approximately £70,000 per year.

Our benefits include:

• The option to use 10% of your time for self development
• 25 days of paid holiday, plus bank holidays
• Standard UK pension, with 3% contribution from employer
• Flexible work hours and location
• Private medical insurance
• Long-term disability insurance
• Gym, shower facilities, and free food provided at our London office

We have a really awesome team and are excited for more people to join us in our mission to help people use their careers to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We’d especially like to encourage people from under-represented backgrounds to apply.

To apply, please fill in this application form. If you have any problems submitting the form, please send your CV to jess@80000hours.org. Applications are due by 23 August 2022.

Note: This is a role which does not require prior experience. However, if you’re a more senior marketer who is enthusiastic about 80,000 Hours’ mission, we’d still be really excited to talk to you about whether you might be able to help. Please apply above or email jess@80000hours.org.

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