More on Humane Insecticides from Jeff Lockwood

Below is an email conversation with Jeffrey Lockwood on the subject of humane insecticides. Thanks so much for the insights, Jeff!

[me:] What's your tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect-control methods?

Also, I'd like to support research on this question in more seriousness within a few years. How would you recommend beginning that process? Would I contact professors and grad students to see if one of them would be interested in writing a paper on the topic? (Maybe for an ethics journal or maybe a more science-based one.)

Suppose the effort got a little more traction. How would we then go about advocating for the use of humane insecticides? For example, imagine that the Humane Society got interested in the cause and wanted to run a campaign. What could they do? Maybe find and support farms willing to switch to the better methods? Ask schools to buy from those farms (similar to the current cage-free-egg campaigns)?

[Jeff:] As for a tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect control methods, that's a real challenge! But let me try a very 'soft' ranking:

Cultural control: Preventing insects from occupying a resource (e.g., habitat modification) seems the most humane approach as no beings are directly harmed (at least [when] this is possible).

Physical control: [... Some] forms of physical control would likely cause suffering (e.g., picking and crushing) but the duration would be relatively brief.

Biological control - predators: Death from predators is often relatively rapid, although this is not certain. Larger predators (e.g., birds or skunks) are rather more efficient in their killing than small predators (e.g., ants or beetles).

Chemical control - neurotoxins: Depending on the dose, it appears that death comes quickly. Of course, at low doses the individual may be rendered physiologically and behaviorally dysfunctional and prone to a slow death. It should also be noted that many non-insect species are likely to be intoxicated, and these non-target species would substantially lower the ranking of this approach if taken into account. [me: This assumes they're not better off dead. I think killing non-target organisms may be a bonus because their lives probably aren't worth living.]

Chemical control - growth regulators: The insect, in my observations, often dies very slowly in a protracted state of dysfunctionality during which the individual is highly susceptible to scavengers and small predators.

Biological control - pathogens: The type of pathogen matters a great deal. Many viruses, for example, don't appear to inflict substantial suffering. However, various fungi appear to work rather slowly and erode the capacity of the insect.

Biological control - parasites: As with pathogens, there are many different parasites. However, it does not appear that death is quick and the quality of life appears to slowly erode. It has been noted, however, that some parasitized insects appear to act normally for much of the period of parasitization.

These are really brainstormed rankings and I'd be very open to refutation of my simplistic rationales.

As for moving the discussion into a wider venue, I can offer a few ideas. It might make sense to begin with a symposium as part of a national meeting. Perhaps the Entomological Society of America would be an interesting venue. Or you might go with a more philosophical setting for the discussion. There are also some organizations that fund/host workshops -- and I can imagine that a 1-week meeting to gather people together to hash out ideas, argue about positions, and exchange perspectives could be extremely exciting. Some journals are open to proposals for "special issues" (Psyche and Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics come to mind), and you might also approach some academic publishers with this concept (this would be particularly viable following a symposium or workshop).

In terms of taking the concept into the realm of application, I would think that the Human[e] Society might be a fine organization. The concept of human[e] pest control/management is very intriguing. Of course, most people won't put a great deal of energy or thought into the matter. However, if there were alternatives that were no more (or even less) expensive AND more humane, then it could well matter to many people. In the best of all worlds, the Humane Society might provide a scoring or ranking system for methods and products (and even provide some explicit endorsement for consumers). The Freedom Foods label through the RSPCA would be one such model (perhaps insects could even be incorporated into the considerations for producers who seek this label). I suspect that some of the "what to do?" possibilities might make a most interesting session in a symposium or workshop.

Lockwood on Insect Pain

Jeffrey Lockwood is an entomologist with whom I've had several email conversations about insect suffering. He defends the possibility of insect sentience in several pages of Lockwood, J. A. 1987. The moral standing of insects and the ethics of extinction. Florida Entomologist 70: 70-89.

He has a new blog post, "Do Bugs Feel Pain?," presenting three lines of evidence that the answer to this question may be "yes."

After this, he says:

So, given that we can’t be sure whether insects experience pain, how should we treat these creatures? When I was teaching insect anatomy and physiology I insisted that the students anesthetized insects before conducting experiments that we would expect to inflict pain on a mouse. My rational[e] is two-fold.

First, it seems ethically obligatory to guard against the possibility that insects feel pain. If we use anesthetic and it turns out that insects don’t experience pain, the material cost of our mistake is very low (a few extra minutes to apply cold or carbon dioxide). However, if we don’t use anesthetic and it turns out that the insects were in agony, then the moral cost of our mistake is quite high.

Second, I think that treating insects as if they can experience pain cultivates an attitude of respect toward living organisms. And this seems like a good thing. We learn the methods of dissection through practices—and we also learn virtues such as compassion through practice. Perhaps we become overly careful in our actions by including animals that aren’t sentient, but world that is more mindful of other beings than is strictly necessary is okay with me.

Of course, there are circumstances in which we are justified in crushing, poisoning, or otherwise harming insects. Nobody wants to suffer hunger or malaria. We must protect our food and bodies. And so inflicting suffering and death is part of life; we live with the existential dilemma that we must kill to live. But we are also obligated to minimize the harm that we do—and insects are a part of this duty.

I agree that killing insects isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if I were an insect, because my lifespan would be so short, I would prefer to be killed with minimal pain now rather than die by parasites, dehydration, or in a spider's web a few weeks later. (This assumes that life itself would be pleasant, which is dubious.)

However, this killing should be as painless as possible. Jeff endorses euthanasia in the case of laboratory experimentation, but I maintain that it's quantitatively orders of magnitude more important in the case of insecticides on crops. There's a broad spectrum (pardon the pun) of painfulness in the realm of insect-control methods. Some insect-killing practices, like spraying Bt or introducing natural predators, would seem to be very unpleasant. Others, like pheromone disruption or insect-growth regulators, are nearly free of suffering for the targets, and as a bonus, they reduce insect populations for the future, preventing many lives of suffering before those lives get started.

I hope eventually to do more research and perhaps advocacy in the realm of encouraging farmers to adopt more humane methods of pest control that simultaneously continue to prevent insect lives that aren't worth living. Suggestions from readers on how to begin this are welcome!

Matched Donations for Vegan Outreach through 30 June 2011

Since 1 May 2011, Vegan Outreach has been matching donations dollar-for-dollar, and the matching drive continues through the end of June. One way to donate is to sponsor someone on the Team Vegan page, although contributions to the general fund will be matched as well. I encourage you to donate!

Below is a powerful video about factory farming from February 2011. The information is nothing new, but the footage and presentation is very compelling. Keep in mind, of course, huge quantitative difference between milk/beef and chicken/fish. (You can even observe the contrast visually from the shots of huge numbers of small fish being harvested.)

It's heartening to see how much suffering we can prevent by just a little bit of money donated on our part.

Ask for donations for Christmas

Economists are fond of pointing out the dead-weight loss of holiday gifts, and based on personal experience, I have to agree with the complaint. Considering how much suffering can be prevented by a single dollar, it's tragic to consider what the money is used on instead.

The economically ideal approach would be to transfer cash, and utilitarians would most benefit from this as well, since they could then use that cash for the purpose they consider optimal. However, cash donations may not be received well by many people -- cash doesn't feel "gift like," because people tend to put money into a mental category of "cold-hearted greedy stuff" rather than "a sincere expression of caring."

Instead, I suggest asking your family and friends to make a charitable donation on your behalf. I sent an email to those who might give me gifts requesting that, if they do give anything, please make it a donation to Vegan Outreach in my name. I encourage readers to consider trying this as well.

Macro- vs. Micro-Optimization

Say you're trying to add up a 10,000 numbers. You need to get the answer as soon as possible, so you think about how best to go about the task. You might say, "Well, getting the job done quickly is important, so let me squint my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and concentrate really hard, so that I can have as much mental focus as possible while I get through this." You then proceed to use a pencil and paper to add the digits, sweating and wrinkling your brow as you focus your concentration for the next 10 hours until the task is complete. Meanwhile, your friend downloads the digits to a computer, pastes them into Excel, and figures out the answer a minute later.

Ah, the power of macro-optimization! I've noticed a number of instances recently in which I and other people tend to get overly caught up in thinking about micro-level decisions on a day-to-day basis, without spending enough time thinking about higher-level structural choices. For instance, Should I procrastinate for another X minutes? Should I keep exercising or stop? Do I go for one more brownie or not? Shall I spend money on purchasing this particular item that I could live without?

These are all important questions, and their answers are not irrelevant. It is important to avoid procrastinating, not to waste money on luxuries, and so forth. There is a place for exerting effort in these decisions. But if you find yourself burning up willpower on such questions on a regular basis, then you're probably doing something wrong. In general, life doesn't have to be a day-in-day-out struggle to "do the right thing" by sheer force of effort. Very often, there are high-level structural changes and/or rules that you can put in place such that the micro-optimizations become minor or altogether unnecessary.

One case where this applies is with food choices. I've found that if I buy junk food and have it around the house, the day becomes a constant willpower struggle with the question, Shall I go ahead and eat another cookie or not? But if I don't buy the junk food in the first place, and if I go for a long enough period that my cravings for it subside, then the question vanishes from my mind, and I don't think about cookies at all. Similarly, many people find that going completely vegetarian (say) is easier than going almost-vegetarian, just because the question, "Should I eat meat on this particular occasion?" doesn't constantly arise. (That said, I personally find that near-vegetarianism works well for me, since I don't find avoiding meat difficult in the first place. And of course, it's important to consider the widely variable impacts of different types of animal foods.)

In other cases, the best solution may be not to set a rule to do the right thing but, rather, to allow oneself to do the wrong thing with the bargain of doing the right thing in another area of higher value. For instance, I sometimes feel guilty about not doing some tangible action that would prevent a little bit of immediate suffering -- e.g., looking for injured worms stranded on the sidewalk that could be put out of their misery. Sometimes I do stop to help the worms, but at other times, I instead promise myself to put in extra effort later toward another action (like promoting awareness of the general problem of worm suffering in the wild) with arguably much greater value. I also sometimes feel guilty about spending money to buy chewing gum, because it's a "junk food" that I could clearly live without; but I've noticed that there are a number of other areas of my grocery budget where I could more painlessly reduce costs, and I promise myself that I'll make bigger cuts there in return keeping the gum. Similarly, a number of people I know have noted that rather than going vegetarian, many people might find it easier to continue to eat meat personally and to instead donate, say, an extra $100 a year to Vegan Outreach, with the latter action having an arguably bigger total impact on animal suffering.

Similar thinking applies in many other areas. For instance, say you're persuaded by Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" but don't want to live at the level of a Third-world peasant. You could probably do better by continuing to live a normal lifestyle in a First-world country, taking a high-paying job, and donating your earnings. Chances are that even a spendthrift investment banker will have more cash left over to donate (to, say, the Singularity Institute, or toward promoting concern about wild-animal suffering) than the most frugal of secretaries or farm workers. In addition, rather than hyper-optimizing your own income, it's worth considering whether you could achieve more total donations for a given cause by spending less time on work and more time networking with friends and colleagues who might contribute.

Finally, the same sorts of logic apply with respect to where one donates. To use a slogan of Givewell, "Don't give more; give well." If you can use a fifth of your donatable funds to double the cost-effectiveness of your final donation by researching the best charities, you will have made more total impact. Or if you spend slightly less time earning money in order to have a bit more time to assess your values and options for donating, you're making a wise tradeoff.

The questions about willpower and personal effort may seem different than those about allocation of time and money. On the inside, it often feels as though we should be able to make the right individual choices all the time. Sure, we can't blame people for having limited budgets or a finite number of hours in the day, but when they expend money on a product they could have lived without, or when they waste time on a fun activity instead of working more, it sometimes feels like they're blameworthy, because "they could" have done differently. But the fact of the matter is, willpower, energy, and motivation are themselves finite resources, and sometimes "wasting time" on having fun is the right choice.

And for yourself: Rather than feeling guilty about every little apparently sub-optimal decision that you make, try to direct your guilt toward those areas that you rationally observe have the highest value. For instance, as mentioned above, rather than feeling guilty about every $0.10 stick of gum that I chew, I've worked toward eliminating more expensive processed foods that I buy and, better yet, spending extra time thinking about long-term career and lifestyle choices that will have much more significant financial impacts.

In many ways, this relates back to the post on salience and motivation. The micro-optimization choices that we make are clear and immediate: It feels morally important to make the right decision in those cases, and we feel bad about ourselves when we don't. Yet -- as the case of adding 10,000 numbers illustrates -- many times there are solutions beyond sheer force of will that can end up making a bigger real-world impact. Moralizing isn't the answer to every problem. And indeed, because willpower is limited, expending guilt should only be a last resort: In general, there are other structural changes you can make (to your work environment, your purchasing habits, your topics of mental focus, your health choices, and so on) that will eliminate the willpower dilemmas altogether. In other words, focus on finding the right rules more than on forcing yourself to do the apparently optimal thing in each situation; the latter is a recipe for burnout.

(I suppose this discussion is relevant to the act- vs. rule-utilitarianism debate, among other things.)

Research on Insect Consciousness

An old blog post on the blog "Intelligent Life is All Around Us" drew my attention to a fascinating Discover Magazine article, "Consciousness in a Cockroach." I've included some quotations from that piece below. I wonder: What are the best ways to support further research like this?

"Many people would pooh-pooh the notion of insects having brains that are in any way comparable to those of primates," Strausfeld adds. "But one has to think of the principles underlying how you put a brain together, and those principles are likely to be universal."

The findings are controversial. "The evidence that I've seen so far has not convinced me," says Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at Caltech. But some researchers are considering possibilities that would shock most lay observers. "We have literally no idea at what level of brain complexity consciousness stops," says Christof Koch, another Caltech neuroscientist. "Most people say, 'For heaven's sake, a bug isn't conscious.' But how do we know? We're not sure anymore. I don't kill bugs needlessly anymore."

Heinrich Reichert of the University of Basel in Switzerland has become more and more interested in "the relatedness of all brains."

[...]

"Attention," says van Swinderen, "is a whole-brain phenomenon. A thing is not purely visual, not purely olfactory. It's a binding together of different parts that for us signify one thing. Why couldn't the fly's mechanism [of attention] be directed to a succession of its memories?" he asks. "That, to me, is just a short hop, skip, and a jump away from what might be consciousness." The difference between the memories of a fly and a human might be a matter of degree. The human can store a lot more memories and can therefore maintain a more sophisticated personal narrative of his past and present. But van Swinderen believes "it could be exactly the same mechanism in a fly and a human." Although there is still no evidence to decide either way, the result could be consciousness.

"Probably what consciousness requires," says Koch of Caltech, "is a sufficiently complicated system with massive feedback. Insects have that. If you look at the mushroom bodies, they're massively parallel and have feedback."

Chemical clues confirm that at least some fundamental brain processes are the same in humans and insects. Van Swinderen and Rozi Andretic, a neuroscientist at NSI, have found that mutant flies producing too little of the neurotransmitter dopamine have impaired salience responses. Feeding the mutant flies methamphetamine—a chemical related to drugs used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—relieves the dopamine shortage and normalizes the flies' attention. But give meth to a normal fly and it cannot attend as well. "Similar mechanisms are present in vertebrates and flies," Andretic told me.

When you consider that neurons themselves are strikingly similar across the animal kingdom, it all begins to make sense. "You have the same basic building blocks for vertebrates and invertebrates," says Strausfeld, "and there are certain ways you can put these building blocks together [into brains]." So when it came to building a brain center like the hippocampus that can recognize places, there might have been only one way to wire those quirky neurons together to do the job—and evolution arrived at that same solution multiple times independently, just as the genetic instructions for wings evolved multiple times in distinct lineages.

Salience and Motivation

There are a few basic life activities (eating, sleeping, etc.) that cannot be ignored and have to be maintained to some degree in order to function. Beyond these, however, it's remarkable how much variation is possible in what people care about and spend their time thinking about. Merely reflecting upon my own life, I can see how vastly the kinds of things I find interesting and important have changed. Some topics that used to matter so much to me are now essentially irrelevant, while others that I had never even considered are now my top priorities.

The scary thing is just how easily and imperceptibly these sorts of shifts can happen. I've been amazed to observe how much small, seemingly trivial cues build up to have an enormous impact on the direction of one's concerns. The types of conversations I overhear, blog entries and papers and emails I read, people I interact with, and visual cues I see in my environment tend basically to determine what I think about during the day and, over the long run, what I spend my time and efforts doing. One can maintain a stated claim that "X is what I find overridingly important," but as a practical matter, it's nearly impossible to avoid the subtle influences of minor day-to-day cues that can distract from such ideals.

Needless to say, subtle cues are the reason advertising works so well. They're also why people are correct to warn against corrupting influences -- e.g., when fundamentalists discourage their children from attending liberal colleges. To an individual person, it feels so impossible that her concerns, attitudes, and emotional states could possibly change -- they just feel so right and necessary and inevitable -- but taking the outside view, even with respect to one's own life, clearly proves otherwise.

I have been fortunate that, for the past ten years or so, I've never lost an idealized commitment to the overriding goal of reducing suffering (though I have grown much wiser about how exactly that task is best attempted). Still, on a day-to-day basis, what I accomplish toward that goal has varied tremendously; there have been days or even weeks when I've found myself completely distracted by other concerns. To some extent, this is necessary and important. For instance, those who take the approach of making money to prevent suffering need to find their alternate occupations intrinsically interesting or else will give up rather quickly. Creating subgoals with their own instrumental payoffs is essential for accomplishing any sort of long-term project. (Hence why people set deadlines, give homework assignments, schedule exams, perform periodic reviews, and so forth.) But from the standpoint of goal stability, it's also crucial not to let these subgoals take over and become ends-in-themselves. (For there's no intrinsic reason they couldn't be ends in themselves -- as I suggested at the beginning, pretty much anything apart from basic self-maintenance can become a person's chief concern.)

In view of the impact of subtle, everyday influences on one's unconscious mind, I recommend the following (to myself as much as to others): Don't just claim to care about reducing suffering in the abstract. Also manipulate your environmental influences toward the same end. Surround yourself with people who share that purpose. Read about reducing suffering when you first wake up and are getting started with the day. Cancel email subscriptions to irrelevant newsletters and add subscriptions on topics of which you want to be reminded regularly. Same for the blogs you read with RSS. Make regular time to remember why suffering matters -- for instance, by watching videos that depict the seriousness of suffering. Get a picture of a snake eating a live rat for your office wall.

Even if you think these things are unnecessary or trivial ("Of course I care overridingly about suffering -- how could I feel otherwise?"), do it anyway. Emotions change like the wind, and one day's overriding concern is tomorrow's irrelevant cause.

Because these cues are so fickle and arbitrary, they rarely square with quantitative assessments of situations -- as evinced by, say, the tendency of many in rich countries to help moderately low-income people in their own neighborhoods over those completely destitute in the Third world, or the tendency of people to focus on human suffering even when that of other species preponderates by orders of magnitude. So it's important also to design one's environmental influences in a way that correctly represents the quantitative facts about a situation. Examples of this include hunger banquets or depictions like "If the world were a village of 100 people," in which quantitative data is translated into emotionally digestible form without losing its accuracy. It's for this reason that I hesitated to suggest the snake-eating-rat picture above, because in quantitative terms, the potential suffering of insects outweighs that of other animals by orders of magnitude in expected value. Similarly, it may be that recondite details of physics, cosmology, and anthropics imply vastly non-intuitive conclusions about the distribution of suffering in the multiverse and how best we can ameliorate it.

That's basically the theme of this blog, as well as the reason that basic research by groups like SIAI is so crucial. First do the math, and then come up with the "marketing" (feel-good images and unconscious persuasions) to back it up. But don't neglect the marketing: Math alone can't sustain motivation on a day-to-day basis. We also need the help of appropriately designed social and environmental surroundings to keep our emotions in line with our fundamental values.