This is a section of veganism that I don't really know much about. I know some people advocate for humans working to reduce the suffering of animals in the natural environment. I do understand the drive behind it because animal suffering is horrible even if it's natural, but on the other hand is it our place as humans to intervene in the environment like that? My personal view of environmentalism always hinged on making as little change as possible to local environments, to the point where I avoid foraging or picking flowers to reduce my impact.
If anyone knows any good places to read some theory on this topic, or if you have any of your own thoughts on this I'd love to hear from you.
I've never heard of this and I know quite a few militant vegans. It seems counterintuitive for "anti-speciesist" people to think that humans know better than animals in their own habitats. Depending on what actions are taken it could also be harmful to an ecosystem.
That's what I thought too, it gave me the same vibes as people who talk about using aerosols to solve climate change. Too much hubris in what humans can do, and way too many potential negatives
That's a great point that I've noticed in my own thinking about these topics in how difficult it can be to synthesis the two frameworks in certain circumstances, but I've never seen it elaborated like that. So just from a vegan argument, do you see any reasonable approaches to reducing natural suffering?
no action is the best action sums it up
it's consequentialist for me in both cases as a utilitarian, like I can't have one code of ethics in one situation and a different code in another
but consequentialism can still lead to ironclad rules like 'not harming animals for pleasure', esp because a statement like this is partly including the consequences. it's saying the small pleasure of taste will never outweigh animal suffering, which is true
if we really believe in well-being for all conscious creatures, there's no reason to exclude the well-being of animals just because they live in a certain ecosystem, live a certain distance away from cities, aren't domesticated, etc
that said, we're powerless to reduce suffering in 'the wild' right now, except by not fucking things up for animals. we can avoid killing them ourselves at least, by managing global warming and pollution. we can do certain kinds of population control like neutering feral cats, etc, or taking care of injured wild animals
but if we mean really stopping animal deaths in the wild, e.g. if we could do something like turn carnivores into herbivores using 5G energy beams, we can't predict the consequences down the food chain, or how many animals that might inadvertently kill. fewer changes to ecosystems are generally better. if we could ever safely stop animals from eating each other in the wild it would be good, but it's more of an idea for the distant future, if ever
I think there's a distinction to be made between:
- stopping humans from murdering non-human animals
- stopping the murder of non-human animals
We can all agree on 1 (I hope, if you're reading this), whereas your post is addressing point 2.
Here's another complication on top:
3. stopping humans from murdering humans
4. stopping the murder of humansI think most people will agree that while 3 is ok, we want 4. We don't quite care who or what harms humans (within reason, obviously, murder can be justified if it happens in self-defence and so on and so forth). We generally want to preserve human life and while the specifics matter we don't really care for technicalities like "well actually no human directly killed this guy, he just happened to go to a workplace environment that had asbestos in the air for the past 5 years, ah well".
I think this is the major difference when it comes to inter-species stances on murder. And this is how most non-vegans arrive at (humorous) critiques of animal advocates that amount to "why don't you protest wolves eating chickens then?".
I do want to make one thing clear, within current events of things that are happening as we speak, factory farming is heinous and we should remove it, however many animals are eaten by wolves or w/e don't even matter as a pure numbers game. That being said, from the point of view of pure debate about principles, in a contextless void, I am left thinking, why is it right to limit myself at point 1 when it comes to animals, but want point 4 when it comes to humans. If I wanted 2, there are some questions of pragmatism. It kind of implies that we would know what we're doing, when chances are that we don't.
I don't have any answers, but have wondered about the same thing and this is where my thoughts have led me. I might be wrong, and I'd like to think what you think.