An attitude of caring about animals in the wild can potentially have a big impact not only on the animals currently living but on future ones as well. This is very important, because if we really care about what happens to animals, we should not worry only about those living today.
Think for a moment of a wild animal. What animal do you picture in your
mind?
When asked this, most people picture healthy, adult, big exotic mammals (or
maybe another big vertebrate), such as a lion or an elephant. They think of
happy animals, enjoying themselves without any human causing them harm. This
is a view of the situation of animals in the wild that is prevalent today.
Despite this, there are many people around the world rescuing and aiding
wild animals in different ways, as we will see later. These animals would
otherwise die in painful ways. Life is not easy for animals out there. From
the very moment they are born or hatch from their eggs, they must face very
serious threats, which cause them to suffer a lot.
The factors from which animals suffer are very diverse. Some are due to
direct human action. Others may be indirect results of human action, natural
circumstances, or combinations of the two. Among the factors that can be
partly or completely natural are hostile weather conditions, hunger and
malnutrition, thirst, a wide range of diseases, accidents and injuries,
conflicts with other animals, parasitism, and psychological stress. These
are not unusual circumstances, and the harms animals undergo due to them are
not trivial. They are as painful and severe to them as they would be to
domesticated animals or to us. In fact, due to them, many animals have lives
that contain much more suffering than pleasure.
We can think, for instance, of a bird chick who falls from her nest and
agonizes, starving to death on the ground for days, suffering from the cold,
the distress, and the pain of the injuries she received due to the fall. Or
a baby fish starving after never being able to find any food. Such cases are
common among young animals. Other animals may be able to survive for longer
and reach adulthood but undergo chronic pain, or die after having endured a
lot of suffering. One example of this is a deer suffering from Nasal Bot
parasitic infection. These are larvae that grow in their nasal cavities
until they are so numerous and so large that the deer is no longer able to
breath and slowly suffocates to death.
Examples such as these suggest that the idea that the best we can do for
animals in the wild is to leave them alone is not always correct. There are
many cases where we can’t do anything to help animals, or where helping them
may entail causing greater harm to others. But there are other cases where
we can make a significant difference for animals that can be net-positive
overall.
Some people who, like us, care about animals, might wonder why this should
be an issue, given that there are so many visible ways animals are harmed by
humans today, such as those kept in captivity or harmed in the wild by
things like fishing. Concern about animals suffering for other reasons is
just an expansion of this concern. There is no contradiction in caring about
all animals, regardless of whether they are being harmed by humans or from
other causes, such as harmful weather conditions or disease. There would be
a contradiction in caring only about what happens to the animals that humans
harm, and not caring about other animals.
Why wild animal suffering is very important
In order to get a better sense of the importance of wild animal suffering,
we need to be aware that many animals have lives filled with suffering, like
the ones described above. Such cases are much more numerous than we might
initially believe. We can see this by examining how animal populations
evolve, and what their mortality rates in their youth are. This is studied
by different fields in biology, examining the animals’ population dynamics
and life histories.
A key factor determining this is the reproductive strategy that different
animals follow. In nature, there are some animals who reproduce by having
just one offspring at a time. These are animals who typically give a lot of
parental care to their offspring, to maximize their probabilities of
survival. However, most animals follow a very different reproductive
strategy, bringing into existence a very large number of offspring. The
survival rates of these animals at the beginning of their lives is typically
very low. If the animals in question reproduce just once during their lives
and their populations remain stable, on average only two of their offspring
per litter or clutch makes it to adulthood (that is, one per parent). If
they reproduce several times, the average number decreases.
Some of these animals might survive for some time even if they do not manage
to reach maturity. But in many cases, they die not long after they have
started to exist. Some of them might never develop into sentient beings. But
many of them do, and they typically die in ways that are likely to be
painful, sometimes extremely so. They starve to death, are killed in painful
ways, or die due to other factors, such as cold or disease. However, because
they are very young when they die, they are likely not to have had
opportunities to enjoy any pleasures. They experience little more than the
pain of their death. Due to this, suffering appears to outweigh happiness in
their lives. Unfortunately, these animals are probably a majority of those
who come into existence. This indicates why wild animal suffering is of
great importance. It also shows why it can make a big difference that there
actually are ways to help some of these animals. The following are some
examples of this.
Causes of wild animal suffering and ways to aid animals
Animals in the wild can suffer very significantly and die prematurely due to
different factors, including hostile weather conditions, natural disasters,
diseases of many different kinds, parasitism, hunger, malnutrition and
thirst, psychological stress, conflicts between animals, and accidents that
can cause them severe injuries. In many cases, however, they are helped.
There are many examples of this. They include rescues of animals stranded on
beaches, trapped in ice, snow, mud ponds and many other situations,
providing shelter and assistance to sick and injured animals, and care for
orphans, and saving some of them from starving in particularly harsh
situations. On a larger scale, vaccination programs save huge numbers of
animals from suffering and dying due to disease. New programs to help
animals can be developed. For example, well-monitored pilot programs can
start with the aim of improving the situation of wild animals living in
suburban, urban, or industrial areas. What we learn from them can then be
applied for animals living in agricultural zones, and then to aid those in
need of help in semi-wild and wild areas. Also, we must bear in mind that in
the future we may be able to improve things in ways we can’t now. For this
to be possible, however, it will be necessary that we have an attitude of
concern, and not of disregard, for animals.
Why do people refuse to support helping animals?
Some people don’t care about what happens to animals at all, despite the
fact that they can also feel and suffer. This appears to be one of the forms
of the discrimination known as speciesism. However, many others do care
about animals, but are often unaware of what happens to wild animals. We’ve
seen just a few examples of the kind of help they need. Most people would
never imagine that wild animals need our help so much. There are reasons
that explain this:
First, most people are not familiar with what the lives of these animals are
like. In particular, they don’t know about animal population dynamics.
Moreover, those who know sometimes fail to reflect on what it means for
animals from the point of view of their suffering.
Second, we have cognitive biases that distort how we imagine animal life in
nature to be. When most people think of wild animals, the image that comes
to their minds is that of big animals, most likely mammals, or maybe big
birds; in any case almost surely vertebrates. They may think of lions and
tigers, perhaps of giraffes, elephants, wolves, eagles… Furthermore, in
almost all cases, they think of adult animals. They seldom think of, say,
fishlings or invertebrates that have just broken out of their eggs. However,
these are the overwhelming majority in nature. Most animals are small, and
most animals are very young ones. The picture of wild animals that many
people have, which is totally unrepresentative, very much conditions the
view many people have of how animal lives are in nature.
Finally, there are also people who think that we should not help animals
living in the wild because doing so is not “natural.” We should note,
however, that when humans are suffering in the way that wild animals
commonly do, we typically support helping them. Why have a different
attitude in the case of animals? This seems to be a form of discrimination
against animals living in the wild. The animals just want to be free from
the suffering caused by those conditions, so we should help them whether or
not humans are responsible for those harmful conditions.
In fact, we should also note that humans already frequently do intervene in
nature to further human interests. We build houses, hospitals, schools,
libraries… We also plant the food we need to eat. If we are ready to
transform our surroundings for the sake of our needs, we should be willing
to do so when other, equally sentient beings like wild animals are need
help.
Learning more about how to best help animals
Because it requires careful study to learn how to best help animals, it’s
important to invest in research that will help us to both optimize the
results for animals and to avoid negative indirect consequences of helping
them. The good news is that there is already a lot of data that could be
used for this purpose. Veterinary scientists have focused on assessing the
wellbeing of domesticated animals, but they have also examined that of wild
animals. Ecologists have researched the population dynamics of these
animals, their life histories, and the way they interact with other animals
and their surroundings. All this can potentially provide us with firm
grounding on which to base programs to help animals.
Unfortunately, knowledge from these different areas is seldom integrated. We
must also bear in mind that concern for nonhuman animals as individuals has
not been included yet among the ends of most scientific research projects.
This is the reason why it has been argued that a new cross-disciplinary
field of research should be created. This new field would allow us to gather
more knowledge that could be used in helping animals in the wild.
In the present, research on this issue can allow us to develop new ways to
help animals, and to examine the existing ways. Some of the current methods
may be more effective than others, which is to say that some of these
methods might allow us help animals more than others. More research can help
us to choose and improve the more effective methods, as well as helping
others to understand how important this issue is.
Gathering more knowledge can aid us in developing new ways of helping
animals that will increase our positive impact in the future. Also, we will
be able to learn more about how the wellbeing of animals is affected on an
ecosystem level in different situations, and of the best ways to achieve
transitions from worse to better situations in the wild.
Due to this, an attitude of caring about animals in the wild can potentially
have a big impact not only on the animals currently living but on future
ones as well. This is very important, because if we really care about what
happens to animals, we should not worry only about those living today. Those
who will live in the future have the potential to suffer just as much, so
making it possible that the future is the best it can be for them should be
a top priority for all of us.