Crossposted from my blog which many people are saying you should check out!

Imagine that you came across an injured deer on the road. She was in immense pain, perhaps having been mauled by a bear or seriously injured in some other way. Two things are obvious:

If you could greatly help her at small cost, you should do so.
Her suffering is bad.

In such a case, it would be callous to say that the deer's suffering doesn’t matter because it's natural. Things can both be natural and bad—malaria certainly is. Crucially, I think in this case we’d see something deeply wrong with a person who thinks that it's not their problem in any way, that helping the deer is of no value. Intuitively, we recognize that wild animals matter!

But if we recognize that wild animals matter, then we have a problem. Because [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:
February 6th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viZhwKytJ6Rqahymf/wild-animal-suffering-is-the-worst-thing-in-the-world

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Wild Animal Suffering Is The Worst Thing In The World” by omnizoid

LessWrong (30+ Karma)