Over the past five decades, animal ethicists have made tremendous progress in articulating the moral importance of the wellbeing of non-human animals. Their work has naturally focused on those domesticated animals we use for food, research, etc. Comparatively little has been written about the moral importance of the wellbeing of wild animals. This is unfortunate, as wild animals far outnumber human beings and their domestic animals, and they suffer from a great number of harms such as predation, parasitism, starvation, and disease. In fact, because most animals reproduce in vast numbers while their populations remain relatively stable, we can infer that the vast majority of them die before reaching reproductive age (Ng, 1995; Horta, 2010; Faria 2023a). The typical life of a wild animal is to be born alongside dozens, hundreds, or thousands of siblings, to receive no parental care, and to struggle for survival in a hostile world, before succumbing to predation or starvation only a few hours or days after birth.
This is the problem of wild animal suffering (WAS). The central question is whether humans should try to intervene in nature to reduce the suffering of wild animals, and, if so, what interventions should be performed. Positions on the intervention question range from complete prohibition (Regan, 2004; Palmer, 2010; Korsgaard, 2018) right up to massive genetic modifications of wild animals (Pearce, 1995; Johannsen, 2021), deliberately making certain animals go extinct (McMahan, 2010, 2015; Bramble, 2021), and the deliberate destruction of wild animal habitats (Tomasik, 2016).
In this integrated thesis, I assume an interventionist position. I explore the implications of recognizing the scale and severity of WAS, and the moral complexities that arise once we begin to systematically intervene in nature on a large scale. In paper one I critique Milburn’s (2022) version of the relational objection to intervention in nature, and I argue that human beings have been morally entangled with wild animals since prehistory. In paper two I argue that the non-identity problem affects the strength and kind of our moral reasons to intervene in nature. In paper three, I argue that WAS is a predictable outcome of the evolutionary process, and this gives us a strong reason not to spread animal life to other planets. In paper four I argue that the basic argument for longtermism applies to animals just as much as it does to human beings, that longtermists ought to take animals much more seriously than they do, and that animal advocates ought to be concerned about the long-term future. In the fifth paper I argue that Totalism has deeply counterintuitive implications when we include animals in the populations to be evaluated
