The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
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The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
Brian Tomasik
Research Consultant, Foundational Research Institute
doi: 10.7358/rela-2015-002-toma brian.tomasik@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Wild animals are vastly more numerous than animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or
kept as pets. Most of these animals endure intense suffering during their lives, such as from
disease, hunger, cold, injury, and chronic fear of predators. Many wild animals give birth to
tens or hundreds of offspring at a time, most of which die young, often in painful ways. This
suggests that suffering plausibly dominates happiness in nature. Humans are not helpless to
reduce wild-animal suffering. Indeed, humans already influence ecosystems in substantial
ways, so the question is often not whether to intervene but how to intervene. Because ecol-
ogy is so complex, we should study carefully how to reduce wild-animal suffering, giving due
consideration to unintended long-run consequences. We should also promote concern for
wild animals and challenge environmentalist assumptions among activists, academics, and
other sympathetic groups. Finally, we should ensure that our descendants think twice before
spreading ecosystems to areas where they do not yet exist.
Keywords: wild animal suffering, natural harms, population dynamics, predation,
death, intervention in nature, sentience, ecology, terraforming, unforeseen con-
sequences.
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.
John Stuart Mill (Mill [18741 2005, 28-32)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/relations3&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
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