Wild animal suffering

A juvenile Red-tailed Hawk eating a California vole

Wild-animal suffering is the suffering of free-living nonhuman animals due to natural processes, although the term could also be used when wild animals suffer due to human activity. Wild-animal suffering has historically been discussed in the context of theodicies as a claimed example of the large amount of evil in the world.^[1][2][3] More recently, a number of academics have considered the issue from a secular standpoint as a general moral problem that we might be able to take action towards preventing.^{[4][5][6][7][8]} It is also now starting to gain the interest of animal protection activists.^{[9][10][11][12]}

The moral basis for intervention can be rights-based or welfare-based. In terms of rights, if animals have positive rights it might be required to intervene in nature to help them.^[13] In terms of welfare, there are animals in the wild that could have their welfare improved.^[14] Due to the large numbers of animals that live in the wild, the vast majority of suffering in the world occurs there.^[15] Advocates of intervention in nature argue that not doing so is inconsistent with most moral theories. Some proposed interventions include refraining from reintroducing predators to wild areas,^[5] vaccinating wild animals, saving wild animals from natural disasters, reducing the number of r-selected animals^[16] and providing medical care to elephants.^[14][17][18]

Opponents of wild animal suffering

John Stuart Mill

In "On Nature,"^[19] John Stuart Mill a British utilitarian philosopher, argued that nature is not moral:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. [...] The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.

Yew-Kwang Ng

Economist Yew-Kwang Ng published a paper in 1995 entitled "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering."^[20] In his paper Ng discusses which animals may be able to suffer, how population dynamics and r-selection cause vast amounts of suffering, and how the situation of wild animals may be improved.

David Pearce

Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce argues in favor of preventing the suffering of wild animals^[21][22] and has outlined how steps might be taken to greatly improve the welfare of free-living elephants.^[17]

Peter Singer

Peter Singer cautions against interfering with ecosystems because he fears doing so would cause more harm than good.^[23] However, as a matter of principle, he believes that if "in some way, we could be reasonably certain that interfering with wildlife in a particular way would, in the long run, greatly reduce the amount of killing and suffering in the animal world, it would, I think, be right to interfere."^[23] Singer also mentions wild animal suffering in The Point of View of the Universe.^[24]

Richard Dawkins

In the book River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins argues that Darwinian nature has no interest in the well-being of organisms and that there is much suffering in the natural world.^[25] In an article titled "God's Utility Function"^[26] based on his book, Dawkins explains:

Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection?

Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene's chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death - as many of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.

Oscar Horta

Oscar Horta, a professor of moral philosophy at University of Santiago de Compostela, has written several papers on the subject of wild animal suffering.^[27] He also often presents lectures on this topic.^[28]

Tyler Cowen

Economist Tyler Cowen argues in his paper, "Policing Nature," that the idea of intervening in the wild to protect animals has been neglected and should be on the agenda.^[14] He argues that there are ways that we can protect animals in the wild at no cost to ourselves, such as by not reintroducing predators to areas, and that most moral theories are probably committed to protecting animals in these cases.

Jeff McMahan

In 2010 The New York Times published an article by Jeff McMahan, entitled "The Meat Eaters"^[7] in which he argues that phasing out predation would be a moral thing to do. McMahan responded to comments on the article in a further piece in The New York Times entitled "Predators: A Response".^[29]

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka

In their book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights^[30] Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue that we should sometimes intervene in the wild to aid wild animals. However, they believe that interventions in the wild should be quite limited and should only occur in areas of the wild that are similar to "failed states."^[31] Other authors argue that much, or all, of nature may be akin to a "failed state" and that we should intervene in nature to a much larger extent.^[32][33]

Potential conflict between animal rights and environmentalism

It has been argued that the common environmentalist goal of preserving the natural order^[34] is not in line with the goal of looking after the welfare of sentient animals.^[35] It has been further argued that they conflict in different cases. Examples include environmentalists supporting hunting invasive species for population control while animal rights advocates oppose it;^[36] animal rights advocates arguing for the extinction or rengineering of carnivores or r strategist species while deep ecologists defend their right to be and flourish as they are; animal rights advocates defending the reduction of wildlife areas or arguing against their expansion out of concern that most animal suffering takes place in them while environmentalists want to safeguard and expand the wild; environmentalists and animal rights activists might also disagree on the value of plants relative to animals.^[18][37]

The amount of suffering in nature

In "Bambi or Bessie: Are Wild Animals Happier?" Christie Wilcox argues that wild animals do not appear to be happier than domestic animals because wild animals have been found to have greater levels of cortisol and to have elevated stress responses relative to domestic animals; furthermore, they do not have some of their needs provided for them like domestic animals.^[38]

Others have argued that because of the prevalence of the r-selected animals in the wild, for the majority of wild animals the average life would be very short and so would have more suffering than happiness in it because a painful death would outweigh short-lived moments of happiness in their lives.^[4][18][20]

Ecology as intrinsically valuable

Holmes Rolston III argues that only unnatural animal suffering is a morally bad thing and that humans do not have a duty to intervene in natural cases.^[39] He celebrates carnivores in nature because of the significant ecological role they play. Others have argued that the reason that humans have a duty to protect other humans from predation is because humans are part of the cultural world rather than the natural world and so different rules apply to them in these situations.^[37][40] Others argue that prey animals are fulfilling their natural function and so they are flourishing when they are preyed upon or otherwise die to allow natural selection to work.^[13] These kinds of arguments have been answered by opponents of wild animal suffering.^[41][42][43]

The practicality of intervening in nature

Another common objection to intervening in nature is that it would be impractical either because of the amount of work involved or because we could not be sure that we were improving the lives of animals on balance due to the complexity of ecosystems.^[44] A reply to this is that there are already many cases in which we intervene in nature for other reasons such as for human interest in nature and environmental preservation as something valuable in its own rights.^[4][14]

Aaron Simmons argues that we should not intervene to save animals in nature because doing so would result in unintended consequences such as damaging the ecosystem, interfering with human projects, or resulting more animal deaths overall.^[45]

Peter Vallentyne suggests that, while humans should not eliminate predators in nature, they can intervene to help prey in more limited ways. In the same way that we help humans in need when the cost to us is small, we might help some wild animals at least in limited circumstances.^[46]

Wild animal suffering as a reductio ad absurdum

That people would also be obliged to intervene in nature has been used as a reductio ad absurdum against the position that animals have rights.^[45] This is because, if animals such as prey animals did have rights, people would be obliged to intervene in nature to protect them, but this is claimed to be absurd.^[47][48][49] An objection to this argument is that people do not see intervening in the natural world to save other people from predation as absurd and so this could be seen to involve treating non-human animals differently in this situation without justification.^[50]

Justifying meat-eating

The fact that other animals in the natural world eat meat is a common argument that eating meat must be morally permissible. One response is that other animals are not aware of what they are doing and so are not culpable for eating meat like humans would be. Others claim that, in fact, predation and other natural events are a bad thing like meat eating is.^[51] People may also cite other cases of "natural" primate behaviors like homicide, rape, and gang violence that we nonetheless regard as morally unacceptable.^[52]

See also

• Appeal to nature
• Environmental philosophy
• God's utility function
• The Problem of Evil
• The Problem of Pain
• Speciesism
• r-selection

References

External links

• Wild animal suffering: a bibliography