THE RIGHT TO BE WILD: Should humans try harder to protect ‘wild’ animals from predators and disease?
A perspective toward wild animals warranting care, not because of their contributions to their ecosystems, but because they are beings worthy of moral concern in their own right, is rare in both science and animal advocacy.
DYLAN MATTHEWS: Agricultural scientists working in the industry or at research universities have learned tremendous amounts about how farmed animals live in captivity, mostly from the perspective of those farming them. Ecologists have learned a good deal about how wild animals interact with each other and contribute to overall ecosystem health, as well as why biodiversity is important for humanity and the overall fate of the planet.
But a genuinely animal-focused perspective toward wild animals — one where snakes and birds and fish and rodents warrant care not because of their contributions to their ecosystems, but because they are beings worthy of moral concern in their own right — is rare in both science and animal advocacy. And it’s often regarded as outright bizarre in the broader world.
But in the past decade or so, a small movement of philosophers and zoologists has coalesced around the idea that wild animal suffering is a very serious moral problem, that the pain suffered by a jumping snake plucked from the jungle matters the same as the pain of a chicken in a factory farm, the pain of a cat in an apartment unit, and even the pain of a human being. Once one accepts that pain matters, wild animal suffering advocates argue, what, if anything, can be done about it becomes an urgent concern.
Many of us are aware of threats to wild animals, particularly when they are threatened by human activity: Think of the koalas and bears dying or suffering in climate change-linked wildfires in Australia and California; or the wild turtle in Costa Rica with a plastic straw stuck up its nose.
But those who’ve adopted the cause of wild animal suffering believe we ought to address even the problems that exist when humans aren’t around. If humans suddenly vanished tomorrow, flesh-eating screwworms would still infest deer, slowly eating them alive from the inside. Lions would still hunt gazelles and violently wrench the meat from their still-moving bodies…
The suffering of animals from predators, disease, and starvation is truly massive in scale. By one estimate, some 24 billion animals are alive and being raised for meat at any given time. We have only the vaguest idea of how many wild animals there might be in the world, but we know the number is high: anywhere from 100 billion to 1 trillion mammals, at least 10 trillion fish, and another 100 to 400 billion birds. Factory farms start to look almost like a rounding error next to the pain and suffering of all the fish in the sea.
“We should reduce the suffering of the literally trillions of animals living in the wild” is a utopian idea, one that flies in the face of ecologists’ general assumption that human intervention is a malevolent force in nature, and that we should leave natural habitats be. The wild animal suffering movement is aware of this reaction, and Wild Animal Initiative has taken a pragmatist turn… They want to answer more basic questions: What sort of factors make for a good life for a jumping snake? What’s it like to live as an owl in a city? They’re trying to do the groundwork for interventions that do more good than harm…
The wild animal suffering movement wants nothing less than for humankind to totally reconceptualize its relationship with the natural world and fellow members of the Kingdom Animalia. It envisions a decades-long moral awakening that takes us from feeling sympathy and resignation when the baby chicks of March of Penguins starve to death, to feeling outrage. It’s a project that, if successful, will end with the jumping snakes Graham loves leaping from branch to branch and feeling as little pain as possible…
This kind of cruelty is more the rule than the exception in nature. But the idea that it could present an ethical problem for humans has been marginal in the modern animal rights debate. Critics of animal rights have used the ostensible preposterousness of intervening on behalf of wild animals as an argument against protecting the welfare of any animals…
Even philosophers interested in the suffering of farmed animals have dismissed wild animal suffering as intractable, not worth worrying about even if wild animals suffered greatly in nature. Intervening by, say, giving antibiotics to wild animals suffering from bacterial diseases, could upset the balance of nature and do more harm than good, they argue…
Scientists have been even more dismissive. “Most commentators in the biological sciences simply assume that nature should not be policed, without offering any rationale,” economist Tyler Cowen noted in a 2003 paper on wild animal suffering. “Through casual conversation I have found that many believers in animal rights reject policing out of hand, though for no firm reasons, other than thinking it does not sound right”…
In the past decade or so, however, this consensus has begun to shift, due in no small part to the efforts of Oscar Horta. A philosopher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and a co-founder of the group Animal Ethics, Horta has spent the bulk of his career trying to get fellow philosophers and animal activists to reject their images of nature as an idyll in which we cannot interfere.
Our first mistake, Horta often notes, is thinking primarily of adult wild animals. We imagine happy adult gazelles roaming free in the savannah, fearful of lions, of course, but with plenty of sources of pleasure in life. That’s among the happiest existences that nature has to offer, Horta argues. Many animals, like turtles, frogs, and most fish, are born in huge batches of hundreds or thousands of animals, only a tiny fraction of which survive. That means that the typical member of those species lives a brief life, likely cut short by a painful death; living long enough to mate is the privilege of a select few…
Horta tells me that when he started making this case sometime around 2008, “It was basically just a few people, and by ‘a few people,’ I mean a few people all around the world. I could count with the fingers on one hand, probably, the number of people I knew who cared about this topic.”
But studying wild animal suffering as a discipline has grown dramatically in the subsequent decade or so, from the pet interest of three or four people to the focus of entire organizations. Horta founded Animal Ethics to promote the idea of “welfare biology,” a term coined by Ng for an interdisciplinary science of animal well-being. A younger generation of philosophers including Catia Faria, Eze Paez, and Ole Martin Moen has embraced the topic and turned it into a blossoming subfield of animal ethics.
Clare Palmer, a prominent environmental ethicist at Texas A&M who has argued against a general duty to help wild animals on the grounds that wild animals lack morally significant relationships to humans, says that concern about wild animals’ suffering has “exploded” within her field since she first wrote about the topic in 2010. It’s become a key pedagogical tool for her…
More senior researchers in the field have embraced arguments for intervention to defend wild animals, too. Martha Nussbaum, the celebrated University of Chicago moral and political philosopher, was the first to jump in, embracing the idea of intervention to protect prey from predators even before Horta, in 2006’s Frontiers of Justice. Jeffrey McMahan, the current holder of Oxford’s White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy, went even further in a 2010 op-ed in the New York Times. The moral problem of predation, he concluded, was so severe that we must consider the possibility that carnivorous species must be rendered extinct, if doing so would not cause more ecological harm than good…
The entire history of conservation, and the field of environmental ethics that has grown around it, pushes us toward a view that accepts or even embraces the suffering of animals in the wild. At worst, it treats animal suffering as a “sad good,” in the words of environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III — a tragic but inevitable fact of nature.
“Morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations,” food and environmental journalist Michael Pollan observed. “It’s very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature?” This is why Wild Animal Initiative want to focus the wild animal suffering movement more on identifying specific ways, from birth control to disease management, to help wild animals. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: