Most animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant lest they be killed, and perhaps experience the terror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases and injuries are never treated. In winter wild animals freeze to death and in droughts they die of heat or thirst.

There are fewer than 20 people in the world dedicating their lives to researching these problems.

But according to Persis Eskander, if we sum up the negative experiences of all wild animals, their sheer number – trillions to quintillions, depending on which you count – could make the scale of the problem larger than most other near-term concerns.

We chose Persis to introduce the problem of wild animal suffering.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interviewThis episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on April 15, 2019. Some related episodes include:

91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened

99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

26 – Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it in every supermarket

20 – Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming

14 – Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse

Series produced by Keiran Harris.