Companion Animal Care Articles used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Ed Boks discusses the creatures who are impacted by war and the suffering that is often overlooked as society narrows its scope of compassion during violent conflict.

How War Collapses the Circle of Compassion
From Ed Boks, Animal Politics with Ed Boks, AnimalPolitics.substack.com
March 2026

Images from Canva

Editor’s note: Animal Politics rarely publishes Op-Eds or posts on Sundays, but the war in Iran presents an extraordinary moment, revealing how quickly society’s moral attention can contract, and how the most vulnerable, including animals, can be forgotten. It is a reminder that the principles we defend in peace are tested most acutely in crisis, and that our compassion matters more when the world is in upheaval.

Ethics Under Pressure

Albert Schweitzer’s great moral insight was that ethics begins with reverence for life, the refusal to treat suffering as important only when it belongs to the powerful, the familiar, or the politically useful. Taken seriously, reverence for life would widen the circle of compassion until war itself became impossible.

War works in the opposite direction.

It narrows the circle. First by necessity, then by habit, then by ideology. It teaches us to sort suffering into categories: the deaths that must be honored, the losses that may be regretted, the destruction that can be rationalized, and the lives that disappear from view altogether.

That is how moral blindness works. It does not arrive all at once. It expands by degrees.

Animals on the Frontlines

Animals are among its earliest casualties.

They are the dogs left behind in courtyards and stairwells when evacuation comes too quickly. They are the cats trapped in shattered apartment blocks. They are the shelter animals waiting for food and water from caretakers who may no longer be able to reach them. They are the birds, livestock, and strays who endure blast waves, smoke, fire, contamination, and abandonment without ever appearing in a casualty report.

They disappear first in the physical chaos of war, when families flee, shelters become unreachable, veterinary care collapses, and supply lines fail. Then they disappear again in public consciousness, as if the terror they endure matters less because they cannot describe it, document it, or demand to be counted.

Yet they are always there.

Near Tehran, the Vafa Animal Shelter has already described what this looks like in plain language, saying that after the bombing campaign began, “providing even the most basic needs for the dogs amid this chaos has become very difficult.”

The suffering does not end at abandonment. The New York Times has reported that strikes ignited four fuel depots near Tehran, releasing hazardous black smoke over the capital, and that residents described “black rain” coating streets, vehicles, plants, and even pets.

In Lebanon, the picture is equally stark. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) reports that its partners are receiving frequent calls from families seeking help for pets left behind or separated during strikes, that one rescue group has already brought nearly 100 animals to safety, and that emergency teams have distributed about 1,700 kilograms of pet food to stray animals, displaced families, and civil-defense teams caring for animals in inaccessible areas.

The Hierarchy of Suffering

This is not a sentimental side issue. It is a moral one.

Wartime suffering is never experienced equally, and societies instinctively prioritize human loss. War dismantles the ordinary routines of care that hold communities together. When people are forced to run for their lives, they often leave behind the beings they love but cannot carry. When infrastructure collapses, veterinary care collapses with it. When fear becomes the organizing principle of public life, the vulnerable become collateral.

Those of us in animal welfare should understand this better than most.

We spend our lives arguing that vulnerability matters. That dependence matters. That suffering matters even when the sufferer cannot speak our language, lobby a legislature, hire a publicist, or command a headline. We insist, often against indifference, that compassion should not be reserved for the articulate, the powerful, or the convenient.

That principle should not be suspended the moment a nation goes to war.

In fact, war tests whether we ever believed it at all.

Some readers will say that when American service members are dying, the last thing we need is an Op-Ed about dogs and cats. That objection deserves respect. The New York Times reported this week that six crew members were killed in the crash of a U.S. KC-135 refueling plane in Iraq, bringing the number of U.S. service members killed in operations related to the Iran conflict to at least 13.

But the point is not that all suffering is identical. It is not. The point is that war trains societies to decide which suffering counts, which suffering is tolerated, and which suffering is ignored altogether.

That is a dangerous civic habit, not just a wartime one.

First we learn to speak of civilian deaths as tragic “collateral damage”. Then we stop asking what happens to the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the displaced, and those trapped beyond the reach of news cameras. Before long, we do not ask about animals at all, because by then they have been sorted into suffering deemed too secondary to matter.

That is the reverse of Schweitzer’s moral vision.

A humane society should widen its circle of concern under pressure, not narrow it. It should resist the temptation to treat empathy as a scarce resource to be rationed only to those whose suffering is easiest to narrate or politically safest to acknowledge. If we cannot hold on to that principle in wartime, then our compassion was never as expansive as we claimed.

Lessons for Animal Welfare at Home

Americans are still going to work, ordering groceries, arguing politics online, and moving through ordinary routines while this war widens. But the animals living beneath the smoke, the strikes, and the forced evacuations do not experience war as strategy. They experience it as terror.

There is also a lesson here for those of us working in animal welfare at home.

War abroad does not stay abroad. It absorbs attention, redirects money, hardens political thinking, and makes every other form of suffering easier to overlook. Local shelters, rescue groups, and struggling pet owners will feel that contraction too if public compassion continues to shrink under the pressure of militarized crisis.

A Test of Compassion

So no, writing about animals in wartime is not a distraction. It is a test.

A test of whether reverence for life is a principle or merely a slogan that survives only in peaceful times. And a test of whether animal welfare has the courage to speak when compassion is being narrowed, sorted, and rationed before our eyes.

War makes animals disappear.

It is the job of animal welfare to make them visible again.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: March 16, 2026
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