A hidden crisis

Literally, quintillions¹ of animals are suffering and dying right now in the wild, due to disease, hunger, thirst, excessive heat or cold, and other factors. Yet, most people—including those who express concern for animals—fail to give importance to this issue. Why?

In this article, we explore the cognitive biases² that lead us to ignore one of the world’s largest sources of suffering and death.³ Understanding these biases can help us think more clearly about our moral responsibilities.

The magnitude of the problem

When we think of animal suffering, we often picture factory farms or labs that test on animals. These are indeed serious problems. But the number of wild animals is vastly larger, estimated between 1 and 10 quintillion at any given time.⁴

To understand this, consider the following analogy:

If we compressed the total number of animals exploited by humans and the total number of wild animals into a one-year timeline, the animals used by humans would represent just 14 seconds. Wild animals would represent the remaining 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 46 seconds.¹

The vast majority of wild animals suffer daily due to natural causes. Despite its immense scale, this issue receives very little attention. Even among animal advocates and animal ethicists, the problem remains largely ignored. This doesn’t seem logical when looking at the figures. Below, we will explore several biases that can cause this.

Status quo bias: Resistance to changing beliefs

Our minds are naturally resistant to change, whether in habits or beliefs. This is known as status quo bias. Several related patterns reinforce this:

Bandwagon effect: we tend to believe what those around us believe
System justification bias: we defend current systems and norms
Conservatism bias: we hesitate to update our beliefs, even with new evidence

Key question: If everyone around you focused only on animal exploitation, how likely would you be to think about the suffering of wild animals resulting from natural processes?

Neglect of small animals

Most wild animals are small, like insects, crustaceans, and fish. However, our brains tend to care more about animals that are:⁶

Larger in size
More intelligent (or perceived as such)
Emotionally relatable to humans

This creates a blind spot (i.e., a situation we are unaware of) because the majority of suffering animals are precisely those that our biases make u...

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