Wild animals and ethical perspectives

Abstract

Few ethicists doubt that humans have duties toward domestic animals, but the question of duties to wild animals is more vexed. Leading issues surround hunting and trapping, animal suffering, appropriate levels of management intervention, poisoning, habitat degradation, feral animals, restoration, and endangered species. Duties to wild animals, if they involve care, also involve non-interference, sometimes called hands-off management. Compassion is not the only consideration; and in environmental ethics it plays a different role than in a humanist ethics. Animals live in the wild, subject to natural selection, and the integrity of the species is a result of these selective pressures. To intervene artificially is not to produce any benefit for the good of the kind, although it would benefit an individual bison or whale. Human beings, by contrast, live in culture, where the forces of natural selection are relaxed, and a different ethic is appropriate.