Are wild animals individuals or interchangeable parts?

Have you ever noticed that the animals we share our homes with are members of our families but wild animals are usually considered “parts of nature”? We know that dogs and cats are individuals with lives that matter to them, but wild animals fill replaceable roles in ecosystems. Most people don’t like to see wild animals suffer, and many people would try to help a baby bird who fell out of her nest or a wounded squirrel who was hit by a car. But when there is not an individual animal suffering in front of our eyes, most of us think of wild animals as representatives of their species or as units of an ecosystem. We consider them a part of “nature.” Nature is out there somewhere, beloved by us but only as long as it’s kept at a safe distance. We exempt ourselves and the animals we share our homes with from being a part of nature and its cycles of suffering and death.

For thousands of years, humans have been debating about what the human relationship to nature should be. We’ve already destroyed or modified parts of it for human use, but the part that is still wild is in dispute. Should we cherish it or conquer it? Manage it or leave it alone? Help or respect its autonomy? But seldom do we ask if the wild animals who live in nature should be regarded significantly differently from the plants and rivers and other elements that make up an ecosystem. The intricate relationship of animals to the ecosystems they inhabit is something we like. It gives us aesthetic pleasure to think of the sense of order, the complex balance, the existence of something wondrous and, for most of human history, beyond our ability to analyze and control. Because nature is bigger than we are and predates us, we are inclined to think it’s something to be respected. “Don’t mess with Mother Nature,” we say. We all know that mother knows best.

We also tend to think of the lives of wild animals as being more good than bad, and there are people who love the romantic idea that autonomy is everything: live free and die young. Not everyone is aware that since most animals lay from dozens to millions of eggs at a time and on average only one per parent survives, nature kills more of her creations than she nurtures. Some who do realize it find the resilience of natural processes so wondrous that they actually enjoy contemplating the suffering that is a part of it. Thoreau wrote on the abundance of life and death in nature:

I love to see that nature is so rife with life that myriads can afford to be sacrificed, and suffer to prey upon one another, that tender organizations can so serenely be squashed out of existence like pulp, tadpoles with herons gobbled up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road. With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. Poison is not poisonous after all. Nor are any wounds fatal. (Walden, Chapter 17)

Wounds aren’t fatal to an ecosystem, to “nature.” But they sure as heck are fatal to the animals who die from them.
Not everyone appreciates the horrors of nature as Thoreau does. There is a nonprofit group in Australia that gets overwhelming responses when it calls for mittens for koalas with burned paws or pouches for orphaned baby kangaroos. Some wild animal rehabilitation centers take in wild animals after natural disasters, and treat them for everything from broken wings to smoke inhalation. Yet this exists alongside popular support for the respect for nature shown by camera crews filming wild animals that discuss in sorrowful tones how sad it is to watch (and film) a baby elephant slowly sinking to her death after getting trapped in quicksand. But, what can they do? they ask. To save the baby would be to interfere with nature, and we all know that Mother Nature knows best.

But does she really? Nature may be beautiful, but she is a cruel mother. Those of who live in homes and find our food already packaged at the supermarket are the 1% among animals. Actually, we are a much tinier percentage than that. There are 15-20 trillion vertebrates on the land and fishes in the sea. There are only about 7 billion humans. And that list only covers about 5% of the animals alive today. 95% of animals are invertebrates, many of whom are conscious and feeling beings as well. Most of the animals who have ever lived have had to fend for themselves in nature and have lived short lives that probably contain more suffering than wellbeing, because most animals lay dozens, hundreds, or thousands of eggs, and most of their offspring die young of starvation, disease, or predation.
Few people celebrate this fact as Thoreau did. Thoreau’s quote seems sociopathic to me, but when I take a step back, I realize it is a part of his search for meaning. He was looking to nature for its ability to help humans develop a little humility, which would ultimately benefit them. This is a view that’s compatible with a conservationist mindset – we should preserve nature for its benefit to us humans. This view has been challenged by environmentalist views such as deep ecology, which sees nature as something with intrinsic value, something we should respect and cherish in and of itself. The apparent focus in deep ecology is not on what we can get from nature, and in fact often calls for the sacrifice of human comforts for the sake of preserving nature. But it still values the natural cycles of an ecosystem above the wellbeing of the individuals who inhabit it.

Now that climate change has become a reality, global uncertainty is forcing us to reconsider the way we think of ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the world. As the global temperature rises, so does the interest in deep ecology. Deep ecologists typically want us to see ourselves as part of the world, rather than as separate from and superior to it. So far, so good. But what does deep ecology really mean? Bill McKibben, who rang the warning bells about global warming in the 1980s with his book The End of Nature, encourages us “to conceive of our species as a species.” (182) By that he means that we should not care so much about our individual wellbeing but rather consider our place in and our impact on the world collectively. We shouldn’t prioritize human comfort against all else, even if that means giving up some of our gadgets and riding a bike instead of driving everywhere.

Views like deep ecology challenge us to confront our anthropocentrism. But as we start to unwind our anthropocentrism, we have to be careful not to congratulate ourselves too soon. Like other “isms,” anthropocentrism is complicated and pervasive and nearly invisible in some of its manifestations, at least to those of us who have been swimming in it since the day we were born, which – let’s face it – is most of us.

By invisible, I mean that even the most blatant logical contradictions go unnoticed by most of us, because we are conditioned to think of animals in two categories: the ones we care about, and the ones we eat. Many people proudly call themselves animal lovers, as if they don’t realize that animals include the ones they eat. Some people think of “animals” only as the animals we share our homes with and think of other animals as meat. It’s common for people to express shock at countries where dog and cat flesh are eaten, while at the same time they eat cows and pigs and chickens because “that’s what they’re there for.” When a soccer player once kicked an owl off a playing field, furious spectators threw down the hot dogs and hamburgers they were eating to rush the playing field. Animal shelters routinely hold barbecues where they grill the bodies of pigs and cows to celebrate the rescue of cats and dogs.

When we think of animals in nature, we tend to think of wild animals as nature. Several of my Facebook friends have photo albums called “Nature,” and they are mostly pictures of wild animals. To most of us, any individual animal serves mainly as a representative of their species. Try Googling “How many animals are there in the world?” or “Number of animals in the world” and the very first thing Google returns is the number of species, not the number of individuals. How many times have you seen a scientist say “the elephant has” or “the chimpanzee is” when referring to all members of the species? Have you ever heard a scientist refer to “the human?” When we refer to humans, we speak of them in the plural, implicitly acknowledging them as individuals.

Deep ecology doesn’t make this kind of distinction among humans and other animals. It sees humans and all other animals as components of a worldwide ecosystem. That may sound good at first, but our anthropocentrism prevents us from seeing how unfair this is. Such a view accepts the birth lottery and feels no obligation to ameliorate its effects. When the animal birth wheel is spun, the result is mostly likely to be an animal of the sea or a small land animal like a beetle, a rat, or a squirrel. Puppy dogs and humans don’t come up very often.

If you were subjected to this animal birth wheel, you would be far more likely to find yourself a bird clinging desperately to a branch as unprecedented hurricane winds blow through a forest than a human feeling heroic for riding your bike and doing without your favorite gadgets. On closer inspection, the argument that we should view ourselves as just a part of nature and we should leave the rest of nature alone means that we are okay with the idea of letting the most vulnerable inhabitants of the planet fend for themselves. The view implies that even in a scenario where humans drastically reduce their own comforts, wild animals should continue to have much worse lives than humans, even if we have the means to help make their lives better. The natural world is as it should be.
In The End of Nature, McKibben keeps circling back to discussions of the “the meaning” of nature. “Nature’s independence is its meaning,” he tells us. (50) He refers to nature’s “exquisite order,” says that it gives us “our images of stability,” and describes natural cycles as safe, stable, and comforting. They cheer and reassure us, he writes. (88-89)

They cheer and reassure us. Us. The humans who contemplate them. Nature’s “exquisite order” may be fascinating, even comforting, but only to us, in our homes in our cities. They are surely not safe, comforting, or cheering to the “myriads” that Thoreau reminds us “can afford to be sacrificed.” Why do nature’s cycles provide comfort and meaning to humans? What does nature mean? It doesn’t seem to me that it does – or could – mean anything at all. It exists in the form it does because it evolved that way. That’s it. Why should something mean something simply because it is natural? And why do we apply this criterion only as long as humans are able to maintain a safe distance from its ravages?

McKibben suggests “that individual suffering – animal or human – might be less important than the suffering of species, ecosystems, the planet.” (154) But this is incoherent. Abstract entities like species and systems can’t suffer. Only sentient animals can.

McKibben recounts with despair a conversation with
a public relations officer for an Oregon national forest who kept insisting to me that one reason the forest service opposed protecting a prime chunk of land as wilderness was that if it was protected, the authorities would be unable to go in and improve the wildlife habitat. He said, ‘You can open up streams where there’s a waterfall by blasting the waterfall to create a more gentle grade so the fish would have a chance to go farther out.’ I’m not arguing that he’s wrong, though by and large, fish seemed to squeak by before the invention of dynamite. It’s just that his concern is for something that looks a lot like nature, but isn’t. (143)

McKibben is right, of course. Managed nature is something different. But when he writes that fish have always squeaked by without the help, he is again looking at fishes as species of fishes, as parts of the natural world. He is thinking about them in terms of what nature means to him as a human, and preferring that to making the lives of fishes better. He doesn’t have anything against fishes. He just likes things the way they are.

McKibben continues, “Instead of being in a category like God, something beyond our control, [nature is] now in a category like the defense budget or the minimum wage, a problem we must work out. This, in itself, changes its meaning completely, and changes our reaction to it.” (179) As with the example of the fish, he is thinking mainly of his conception of the natural as good and changes to nature as bad. He’s preoccupied with the “meaning” of untouched nature, to the detriment of its sentient inhabitants.

At first thought, the idea of helping wild animals might seem to be “unfair” to the non-sentient parts of nature like plants and rivers and mountains. But it is applying the same criteria to every part of the Earth that we apply to humans: trying to reduce harm to those who can be harmed and trying to help those who can be helped. And that’s not anthropocentric. We don’t regard other humans that way because they are human but rather because they can feel, and we extend it to certain other animals like cats and dogs who share our lives because we know that they can feel, too. They can be either helped or harmed by their circumstances, just like humans can be.

Prioritizing the needs of sentient animals above the damage that may be done to non-sentient entities is treating everyone the same, if what we care about is not harming others and helping them when we can. Living things that aren’t sentient can’t be harmed. We don’t need to protect the interests of beautiful plants and flowers, because they don’t have any interests. It is only humans who have an interest in continuing to see them, and some animals who have an interest in eating them. Acting in accordance with the very human idea that what is natural is automatically good is profoundly anthropocentric. It’s not showing “respect” for nature. It’s throwing our fellows under the bus – something we wouldn’t do to other humans, at least not on that scale.

There’s a thought experiment in moral philosophy in which you envision what kind of society you would create if you didn’t know what position you would be born into in that society. You don’t know what sex, race, or class you would be, or how healthy or happy you would be, or how easy it would be for you to access the resources you need without help. The uncertainty about what our position would be in this imaginary society is known as the “veil of ignorance.” This thought experiment is intended to help us come up with the requirements for a fair society. It’s usually applied only to relationships among human beings in human societies, but it could easily be extended to include nonhuman animals. And, if what we care about is not harming others and helping them when we can, then fairness requires that we include everyone who can be harmed or helped. That includes all sentient animals (some animals, like sponges, aren’t sentient).

Since climate change requires us to re-think the way we live on this earth and what our relationship to other living things should be, let’s think it through carefully so that as we fix some human mistakes we don’t perpetuate others. Let’s spend some more time on the basic criterion for moral value. Should it simply be being alive, or the preservation of complex ecosystems simply because they are natural? Or should whether we respect entities be based on whether or not they have a capacity to care about things one way or another? Can they, as I have been stressing, be harmed or helped? Is it possible for them to either benefit from or suffer tremendously from the decisions we make?

An objection that is sometimes raised to this way of thinking is that it is the ultimate human hubris to think of ourselves as the guardians of all wild animals. It is sometimes described as arising out of the human lust for control and dominance. But, wait a minute – since when is helping others dominating them? We have a knee jerk reaction to anything that bears even the faintest resemblance to the Orwellian-speak of imperialist cultures and their paternalism, so it’s understandable – good, even – that we are skeptical about such claims. But skepticism shouldn’t automatically lead to rejection. What we are talking about is not domination. It’s solidarity. It’s not considered domination to help someone who is sick, or injured, or whose home has been destroyed by a natural disaster.

Something that looks like help can be twisted into domination, but it doesn’t have to be. And most of the time, it’s not. Most of us would find it abhorrent to leave human societies alone when they were in desperate need because we didn’t want them to feel “dominated” by our help. We may not perfectly live up to our ideals of helping those in need, but we think we should. Why should we regard other animals who can suffer similarly in a different way? Why should we consider it right to help some groups of sentient animals (humans and their companion animals) and wrong to help others?

With increases in global warming and human population, we are going to have to start managing what’s left of nature. Our survival has depended on the predictability of natural cycles, and now that human activities have made them unpredictable, we will have to intervene in nature to mitigate some of that uncertainty – not just here and there by building dams or putting out forest fires, but potentially anywhere and everywhere. The question is no longer, should we manage nature? It’s, how should we manage nature? If we are really committed to not seeing ourselves as different from the rest of the natural world, let’s start managing nature for the sake of the feeling individuals who inhabit it instead of preserving what we find most aesthetically pleasing. Wild animals don’t need cars and skyscrapers and college educations, but they have the same basic needs as humans in having their greatest suffering reduced, and in having access to clean water and food. Why not make our future wildlife parks – because that is what they will inevitably be – a little more comfortable?
 
Works Cited
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006. Print.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience.1854. Project Gutenberg. Web. 29 July 2011.