Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism?

An additional point:

Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.

My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn't take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.

The bit about desirability bias, or the fact that the optimistic estimates involve claiming that vegetarian ads are vastly more effective than other kinds of moralized behavior-change ads with more accurate measurements of effect?

I think some weighting for the sophistication of a brain is appropriate, but I think the weighting should be sub-linear w.r.t. the number of neurones; I expect that in simpler organisms, a larger share of the brain will be dedicated to processing sensory data and generating experiences. I would love someone to look into this to check if I'm right.

A question at this point I might ask is how good does the final estimate have to be?

First, there are multiple applications of accurate estimates.

The unreasonably low estimates would suggest things like "I'm net reducing factory-farming suffering if I eat meat and donate a few bucks, so I should eat meat if it makes me happier or healthier sufficiently to earn and donate an extra indulgence of $5 ."

There are some people going around making the claim, based on the extreme low-ball cost estimates, that these veg ads would save human lives more cheaply than AMF by reducing food prices. With saner estimates, not so, I think.

Second, there's the question of flow-through effects, which presumably dominate in a total utilitarian calculation anyway, if that's what you're into. The animal experiences probably don't have much effect there, but people being vegetarian might have some, as could effects on human health, pollution, food prices, social movements, etc.

To address the total utilitarian question would require a different sort of evidence, at least in the realistic ranges.

If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we'd need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).

This might be a minor point, but I don't think it's necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don't think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.

Are you suggesting that one simply advertise the existence of good vegetarian recipes without mentioning surrounding reasons for reducing meat?

I agree with Viliam_Bur that this may be effective, and here's why.

I bake as a hobby (desserts — cakes, pies, etc.). I am not a vegetarian; I find moral arguments for vegetarianism utterly unconvincing and am not interesting in reducing the suffering of animals and so forth.

However, I often like to try new recipes, to expand my repertoire, hone my baking skills, try new things, etc. Sometimes I try out vegan dessert recipes, for the novelty and the challenge of making something that is delicious without containing eggs or dairy or white sugar or any of the usual things that go into making desserts taste good.[1]

More, and more readily available, high-quality vegan dessert recipes would mean that I substitute more vegan dessert dishes for non-vegan ones. This effect would be quite negated if the recipes came bundled with admonitions to become vegan, pro-vegan propaganda, comments about how many animals this recipe saves, etc.; I don't want to be preached to, which I think is a common attitude.

[1] My other (less salient) motivation for learning to make vegan baked goods is to be prepared if I ever have vegan/vegetarian friends who can't eat my usual stuff (hasn't ever been the case so far, but it could happen).

This is already a strong component in existing advocacy, though none of it mentions recipes alone. Leading pamphlets like "Compassionate Choices" and "Even if You Like Meat" have recipe sections at the end of the book. Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation has recipes. Vegan Outreach has a starter guide section with lots of recipes.

Many non-vegetarians are suspicious of organizations that try to convince them to be vegetarian. It might be more effective to promote vegetarian recipes separately from "don't eat meat" efforts.

Incidentally, I would love to know of more (not too difficult) ways to cook tofu.

I think that simply promoting good vegetarian meals would potentially reduce meat consumption among certain groups of people that would be less receptive to accompanying pro-vegetarian arguments. I think it should be part of a vegan-advocacy arsenal (i.e. you do a bunch of different sorts of flyers/ads/promotions, some of which is just recipe spreading without any further context)

However, if one of your goals is to increase human compassion for nonhumans, then recipe spreading is dramatically less useful in the long term. One of the biggest arguments (among LW folk anyway) for animal advocacy is that not only are factory farms (and the wilderness) pretty awful, but that it'll hopefully translate into more humanely managed eco-systems, once we go off terraforming or creating virtual worlds.

(It may turn out to be effective to get people to try out vegan recipes [without accompanying pro-vegan context] and then later on promote actual vegan ideals to the same people, after they've already taken small steps that indirectly bias themselves towards identifying with veganism)

That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they're going about it the wrong way.

From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option - though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.

Do you know of any sources for this? In my also non-rigorous experience this is a totally unfounded misperception of veg*nism that people seem to have, founded on nothing but a few quack websites/anti-science blogs.

Consider for instance /r/vegan over at reddit, which is in fact overwhelmingly pro-GMO and ethics rather than health focused. Of course, it is certainly true that the demographics of reddit or that subreddit are much different from that of veg*ns as a whole (or people as a whole). Lesswrong is an even more extreme case of such a limited demographic.

I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:

[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".

But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:

It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.

I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don't see the ethical problems with it don't want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There's demand for in-vitro meat because there's demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.

Maybe it's likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I'd assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes - 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.

If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn't buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.

I agree. In addition, I think people who claim that they will eat more meat after seeing a pamphlet or some other promotion for vegetarianism just feel some anger in the moment, but they'll likely forget about it within an hour or so. I can't see someone several weeks later saying to eirself, "I'd better eat extra meat today because of that pamphlet I read three weeks ago."

If someone says that they are vegetarian for moral reasons, then it's an implicit (often explicit) claim that non-vegetarians are less moral, and therefore a status grab. If an omnivore doesn't want to become vegetarian nor to lose status, they need to aggressively deny the claim of vegetarianism being more moral.

BTW, how comes certain omnivores dislike vegetarians so much? All other things being equal, one fewer person eating meat will reduce its price, about which a meat-eater should be glad.

Vegetarianism generally includes moral claims as well as preference claims, and responding negatively to conflicting morals is fairly common. Even responding negatively to conflicting preference claims is common. This seems to happen for both tribal reasons (different tastes in music) and possibly practical reasons (drinkers disliking non-drinkers at a party, possibly because of the asymmetric lowering of boundaries).

Similarly, why do certain straight men dislike gay men that much?

Simple tribalism is one explanation. It also seems likely to me that homophobia is a fitness advantage for men in the presence of bisexual / homosexual men. There's also some evidence that, of men who claim to be straight, increased stated distaste for homosexuals is associated with increased sexual arousal by men, which fits neatly with the previous statement- someone at higher risk of pursuing infertile / socially costly relationships should be expected to spend more effort in avoiding them.

Are you asking more broadly why people in unmarked cases dislike being treated as though they were a marked case? Or have I overgeneralized, here?

Similarly, why do certain straight men dislike gay men that much

This has to do with the way gay sex interacts with status.

I think David is right. It is important that people who may have a big influence on the values of the future lead the way by publicly declaring and demonstrating that suffering (and pleasure) are important where-ever they occur, whether in humans or mice.

This seems unlikely to be a significant fraction of my impact upon the summum bonum, for good or ill.

Arguably worth it for $30 of reduced guilt, bragging rights and twisted, warped enjoyment of ethical weirdness.

I'm already taking insects or nematodes into consideration probabilistically; I think it is highly unlikely that they are sentient, and I think that even if they are sentient, their suffering might not be as intense as that of mammals, but since their numbers are so huge, the well-being of all those small creatures makes up a non-negligible term in my utility function.

A priori, it seems that the moral weight of insects would either be dominated by their massive numbers or by their tiny capacities. It's a narrow space where the two balance and you get a non-negligible but still-not-overwhelming weight for insects in a utility function. How did you decide that this was right?

Only sentient beings have a first-person point of view, only for them can states of the world be good or bad.

Is the blue-minimizing robot suffering if it sees a lot of blue? Would you want to help alleviate that suffering by recoloring blue things so that they are no longer blue?

But I'd like people to at least have animal suffering on the radar of "things I'd like to give a shit about, if I had the energy, and that if it became much more convenient to care about, I'd make small modifications to my lifestyle." So that when in-vitro meat becomes cheap and tasty, I think people should make the initial effort to switch over. (Possibly even while it's still a bit more expensive).

This is pretty much the case for me. I was vegetarian for a while in high school–oddly enough, less for reducing-suffering ethical reasons than for "it costs fewer resources to produce enough plants to feed the world population than to produce enough meat, as animals have to be fed plants and are a low-efficiency conversion of plant calories, so in order to better use the planet's resources, everyone should eat more plants and less meat." I consistently ended up with low iron and B12. It's possible to get enough iron, B12, and protein as a vegetarian, but you do have to plan your meals a bit more carefully (i.e. always have beans with rice so you get complete protein) and possibly eat foods that you don't like as much. Right now I cook about one dish with meat in it per week, and I haven't had any iron or B12 deficiency problems since graduating high school 4 years ago.

In general, I optimize food for low cost as well as health value and ethics, but if in-vitro meat became available, I think this is valuable enough in the long run that I would be willing to "subsidize" its production and commercialization by paying higher prices.

Most people don't need meat (or much of it) to be productive (the amount most people think they need is pretty grossly wrong)

Could you (very briefly) expand on this, or even just give a link with a reasonably accessible explanation? I am curious.

This all seems pretty reasonable (except that I don't think the validity of a human preference has much to do with how difficult it is for non-humans to have the same preference).

Most people don't need meat (or much of it) to be productive (the amount most people think they need is pretty grossly wrong)

This fact seems to outweigh the rest of your comment.

Whoops. Edited.

This is half a criticism and half a reflection of arguments that have been used against my position that I think are problematic. To the extent that you think these arguments are problematic, I probably agree.

is there any reason why we shouldn't care about the suffering of non-humans?

Resources spent on alleviating the suffering of non-humans are resources that aren't spent on alleviating the suffering of humans, which I value a lot more.

Right, but what's the discount rate? What does your discount rate imply is the net moral worth of all mosquitoes on the planet? All bacteria?

I'm not sure where my line is either. It's hovering around pigs and dolphins at the moment.

but I personally discount based on complexity (or intelligence of whatever.)

Would you apply said discount rate intraspecies in addition to interspecies?

By the way. One question I always wanted to ask a pro-animal-rights type: would you support a program for the extinction/reductions of the population of predatory animals on the grounds that they cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to their prey?

EDIT: the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes

Have you read The Narrowing Circle?

... are you including chimpanzees there, by any chance?

the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes

"Cute" I'll give you.
"Harmless" I'm not sure about.

That is, it's not in the least bit clear to me that I can reliably predict, from species S being harmful and cute, that the Schelling point you describe won't/hasn't shifted so as to include S on the cared-about side.

For clarity: I make no moral claims here about any of this, and am uninterested in the associated moral claims, I'm just disagreeing with the bare empirical claim.

I feel a moral obligation to protect and not excessively harm the environment

Why?

The moral obligation to animals comes from their worth as animals

What worth?

it doesn't change my belief that we should stop eating them to avoid the extinction of the species.

Where does this belief come from?

Why would the suffering of one species be more important than the suffering of another?

Because one of those species is mine?

I'm not sure I can offer a good argument against "human suffering is more important", because it strikes me as so completely arbitrary and unjustified that I'm not sure what the arguments for it would be.

Historically, most humans have viewed a much smaller set of (living, mortal) organisms as being the set of (living, mortal) organisms whose suffering matters, e.g. human members of their own tribe. How would you classify these humans? Would you say that their morality is arbitrary and unjustified? If so, I wonder why they're so similar. If I were to imagine a collection of arbitrary moralities, I'd expect it to look much more diverse than this. Would you also say that they were all morally confused and that we have made a great deal of moral progress from most of history until now? If so, have you read gwern's The Narrowing Circle (which is the reason for the living and mortal qualifiers above)?

There is something in human nature that cares about things similar to itself. Even if we're currently infected with memes suggesting that this something should be rejected insofar as it distinguishes between different humans (and I think we should be honest with ourselves about the extent to which this is a contingent fact about current moral fashions rather than a deep moral truth), trying to reject it as much as we can is forgetting that we're rebelling within nature.

I care about humans because I think that in principle I'm capable of having a meaningful interaction with any human: in principle, I could talk to them, laugh with them, cry with them, sing with them, dance with them... I can't do any of these things with, say, a fish. When I ask my brain in what category it places fish, it responds "natural resources." And natural resources should be conserved, of course (for the sake of future humans), but I don't assign them moral value.

why the suffering of red-haired people should count equally to the suffering of black-haired people

I've interacted with enough red-haired people and enough black-haired people that (assuming the anti-zombie principle) I'm somewhat confident that there's no big difference in average between the ways they suffer . I'm nowhere near as confident about fish.

Human suffering might be orders of magnitude more important. (Though: what reason do you have in mind for this?)

I'm a human and I care about humans. Animals only matter insofar as they affect the lives of humans. Is this really such a difficult concept?

But non-human animal suffering is likely to be orders of magnitude more common.

I don't mean per organism, I mean in aggregate. In aggregate, I think the totality of animal suffering is orders of magnitude less important than the totality of human suffering.

Moreover, if you're uncertain about whether animals suffer, you should err on the side of assuming that they do because this is the safer assumption.

I'm not disagreeing that animals suffer. I'm telling you that I don't care whether they suffer.

Also, do you really not value animals? I think if you were to see someone torturing an animal in front of you for fun, you would have some sort of negative reaction.

Some interesting things about this example:

1. Distance seems to have a huge impact when it comes to the bystander effect, and it's not clear that it's irrational. If you are the person who is clearly best situated to save a puppy from torture, that seems different from the fact that dogs are routinely farmed for meat in other parts of the world, by armies of people you could not hope to personally defeat or control.

2. Someone who is willing to be sadistic to animals might be sadistic towards humans as well, and so they may be a poor choice to associate with (and possibly a good choice to anti-associate with).

3. Many first world countries have some sort of law against bestiality. (In the US, this varies by state.) However, any justification for these laws based on the rights of the animals would also rule out related behavior in agribusiness, which is generally legal. There seems to be a difference between what people are allowed to do for fun and what they're allowed to do for profit; this makes sense in light of viewing the laws as not against actions, but kinds of people.

To me, it feels very inconsistent to not value animals -- it sounds to me exactly like someone who wants to know argument about why they ought to care about foreigners.

Well, and what would you say to someone who thought that?

Also, do you really not value animals?

I don't know. It doesn't feel like I do. You could try to convince me that I do even if you're a moral anti-realist. It's plausible I just haven't spent enough time around animals.

I think if you were to see someone torturing an animal in front of you for fun, you would have some sort of negative reaction.

Probably. I mean, all else being equal I would prefer that an animal not be tortured, but in the case of farming and so forth all else is not equal. Also, like Vaniver said, any negative reaction I have directed at the person is based on inferences I would make about that person's character, not based on any moral weight I directly assign to what they did. I would also have some sort of negative reaction to someone raping a corpse, but it's not because I value corpses.

One can get both protein and deliciousness from non-meat sources.

My favorite non-meat dish is substantially less delicious than my favorite meat dish. I do currently get a decent amount of protein from non-meat sources, but asking someone who gets their protein primarily from meat to give up meat means asking them to incur a cost in finding and purchasing other sources of protein, and that cost needs to be justified somehow.

I'm not sure. I don't think there's a way I could make that transaction work.

Really? This can't be that hard a problem to solve. We could use a service like Fiverr, with you paying me $5 not to eat meat for some period of time.

I am a moral anti-realist, so I don't think there's any argument I could give you to persuade you to change your values.

The relevant sense of changing values is change of someone else's purposeful behavior. The philosophical classification of your views doesn't seem like useful evidence about that possibility.

I think if you were to see someone torturing an animal in front of you for fun, you would have some sort of negative reaction.

That doesn't necessarily mean that I have animals being tortured as a negative terminal value: I might only dislike that because it generates negative warm fuzzies.

To me, it feels very inconsistent to not value animals -- it sounds to me exactly like someone who wants to know argument about why they ought to care about foreigners.

Unfortunately, the typical argument in favour of caring about foreigners, people of other races, etc., is that they are human too.

It also bothers me that the so many of the animals saved are fish; they dominate the weighted mean, have very different lifespans from chickens, and to the best of my knowledge cannot be 'factory farmed' in the same way. (It seems to me that fish farms are much more like their natural habitat than chicken farms are like their natural habitat, but that may be mistaken.)

From what I know, fish farming doesn't sound pleasant, though perhaps it's not nearly as bad as chicken farming.

Here's a gruesome video on the whole fish thing if you're in to gruesome videos.

It also bothers me that the so many of the animals saved are fish; they dominate the weighted mean, have very different lifespans from chickens, and to the best of my knowledge cannot be 'factory farmed' in the same way. (It seems to me that fish farms are much more like their natural habitat than chicken farms are like their natural habitat, but that may be mistaken.)

Well, they can move more, but on the other hand they tend to pollute each others' environment in a way that terrestrial farmed animals do not, meaning that not all commercially fished species can survive being farmed with modern techniques, and those which can are not necessarily safe for humans to eat in the same quantities.

Looking over that argument, in the second link, I notice that those same premises would appear to support the conclusion that the most morally correct action possible would be to find some way to sterilize every vertabrate (possibly through some sort of genetically engineered virus). If there is no next generation - of anything, from horses to cows to tigers to humans to chickens - then there will be no pain and suffering experienced by that next generation. The same premises would also appear to support the conclusion that, having sterilised every vertabrate on the planet, the next thing to do is to find some painless way of killing every vertebrate on the planet, lest they suffer a moment of unnecessary pain or suffering.

I find both of these potential conclusions repugnant; I recognise this as a mental safety net, warning me that I will likely regret actions taken in support of these conclusions in the long term.

This is an argument for vegetarianism, not for caring about animal suffering: many parts of this argument have nothing to do with animal suffering but are arguments that humans would be better off if we ate less meat, which I'm also willing to entertain (since I do care about human suffering), but I was really asking about animal suffering.

$18 a year is way too low.

I started reading the argument (in your second link), racked up a full hand of premises I disagreed with or found to be incoherent or terribly ill-defined before getting to so much as #10, and stopped reading.

Then I decided that no, I really should examine any argument that convinced an intelligent opponent, and read through the whole thing (though I only skimmed the objections, as they are laughably weak compared to the real ones).

Turns out my first reaction was right: this is a silly argument. Engel lists a number of premises, most of which I disagree with, launches into a tangent about environmental impact, and then considers objections that read like the halfhearted flailings of someone who's already accepted his ironclad reasoning. As for this:

OBJ6: What if I just give up one of these beliefs [(p1) – (p16)]?

Engel says, “After all, as a philosopher [assuming we all love wisdom and want to know the best way in which to live], you are interested in more than mere consistency; you are interested in truth. Consequently, you will not reject just any belief(s) you think most likely to be false. Now, presumably, you already think your belief system is for the most part reasonable, or you would have already made significant changes in it. So, you will want to reject as few beliefs as possible. Since (p1) – (p16) are rife with implications, rejecting several of these propositions would force you to reject countless other beliefs on pain of incoherence, whereas accepting [the conclusion of becoming a vegetarian] would require minimal belief revision on your part” (883).

It makes me want to post the "WAT" duck in response. Like, is he serious? Or is this actually a case of carefully executed trolling? I begin to suspect the latter...

Edit: Oh, and as Qiaochu_Yuan says, the argument assumes that we care about animal suffering, and so does not satisfy the request in the grandparent.

Have you owned pets?

I had fish once, but no complicated pets.

it seems clear to me that people are able to form relationships with dogs, cats, rats, and several other types of mammals (this is consistent with the notion that more-similar animals are able to form relationships with each other, on a sliding scale).

People are also able to form relationships of this kind with, say, ELIZA or virtual pets in video games or waifus. This is an argument in favor of morally valuing animals, but I think it's a weak one without more detail about the nature of these relationships and how closely they approximate full human relationships.

Do you care about potential posthumans who share all values you currently have, but have new values you don't care about one way or another, are vastly more intelligent/empathetic/able-to-form-complex-relationships that you can't understand? Do you expect those humans to care about you?

Depends. If they can understand me well enough to have a relationship with me analogous to the relationship an adult human might have with a small child, then sure.

To the extent that you are not able to form relationships with other humans (because they are stupider than you, because they are less empathetic, or just because they're jerks, or don't share enough interests with you), do you consider them to have less moral worth? If not, why not?

I hid a lot of complexity in "in principle." This objection also applies to humans who are in comas, for example, but a person being in a coma or not sharing my interests is a contingent fact, and I don't think contingent facts should affect what beings have moral worth. I can imagine possible worlds reasonably close to the actual one in which a person isn't in a coma or does share my interests, but I can't imagine possible worlds reasonably close to the actual one in which a fish is complicated enough for me to have a meaningful relationship with.

For that matter, even if they did have the opportunity, livestock species may not have the abstract reasoning abilities to recognize that suicide is even a possible thing.

Pigs might have the intelligence for that, but for cows and chickens, I doubt it. It's not like suicide is an evolutionarily favorable adaptation, it's a product of abstract reasoning about death that most animals are not likely to be be capable of.

The other long-term consideration is that whatever we do to animals, AIs may well do to us.

We don't want future AIs raising us in cramped cages, purely for their own amusement, on the grounds that their utility is much more important than ours. But we also don't want them to exterminate us on "compassionate" grounds. (Those poor humans, why let them suffer so? Let's replace them by a few more happy, wire-heading AIs like us!)

Agreed, but the OP was talking about "effective altruism" , rather than about "effective morality" in general. It's difficult to talk about altruism at all except within some sort of consequentialist framework. And while there is no simple way of comparing goods, consideration of "effective" altruism (how much good can I do for a relatively small amount of money?) does force us to look at and make very difficult tradeoffs between different goods.

Incidentally, I generally subscribe to rule consequentialism though without any simple utility function, and for much the reasons you discuss. Avoiding vicious disputes between social agents with different values is, as I understand it, one of the "good things" that a system of moral rules needs to achieve.

At this moment, it seems unclear. Wild animals are definitely a problem. I don't think they suffer more than farm animals, but they might. I'm not sure what the best intervention strategy is, but it's clear that some kind of strategy is needed, both in the short-run and long-run.

I've heard a considerable number of people on this site echo the position that wild animals suffer so much their existence must be a net negative. This strikes me as awfully unlikely; they live in the situations they're adapted to, and have the hedonic treadmill principle going for them as well. You can observe at a zoo how many animals can become neurotic when they're removed from the sorts of circumstances they're accustomed to in the wild, but all their physical needs are accounted for.

Animals are adapted to be reproductively successful in their environments, not to be maximally happy, but considering the effects constant stress can have on the fitness of animals as well as humans, it would be quite maladaptive for them to be unhappy nearly all the time.