"The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" is a 2009 essay by American essayist Brian Tomasik that argues that wild animals experience large-scale suffering and that the topic should receive ethical attention. It was first self-published online under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst" on his website Essays on Reducing Suffering, and later published in the academic journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015. The essay has also been republished and translated, including a French translation published in Les Cahiers antispécistes.
The essay argues that wild animals are far more numerous than animals on farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets, and that many experience suffering from natural processes including predation, fear of predators, disease and parasitism, hunger, cold, injury, and accidents; it discusses how reproductive strategies, population dynamics, and high juvenile mortality may affect the balance of suffering and happiness in nature. It also considers uncertainty about sentience and responds to objections to the claim that many wild lives may be net negative, while discussing ethical and practical questions about human intervention in ecosystems, proposing a research agenda aimed at reducing wild animal suffering, and considering scenarios in which future technologies could increase or reduce such suffering.
It has been summarised by Faunalytics and discussed by the Center on Long-Term Risk, and has been cited in academic and related literature on animal ethics, wild animal suffering, and welfare biology.
Background
Tomasik in 2014
In an autobiographical essay published in 2012, Brian Tomasik described his early interest in wild animal suffering as developing from his engagement with animal ethics and environmentalism in the mid-2000s. He wrote that reading essays by Peter Singer in 2005 led him to take animal suffering more seriously, and that he began to consider how ethical questions about human actions might apply to animals living in the wild as well as to farmed animals.[1]
Tomasik wrote that later reading, including Bernard E. Rollin's Animal Rights & Human Morality and discussion of pain in invertebrates, contributed to his concern that insects and other invertebrates might be sentient and could experience suffering. He described coming to doubt whether life in the wild yields a net surplus of happiness, and cited influences including Gaverick Matheny and Kai Chan's discussion of habitat change and animal welfare, and Yew-Kwang Ng's proposal for welfare biology as a framework for assessing wild animal welfare. Tomasik also cited work in environmental ethics and David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative as shaping his views, and wrote that he produced early analyses and essays on the topic from 2006 onward. Tomasik wrote that correspondence with Oscar Horta in 2008 influenced his thinking and prompted further discussion of wild-animal suffering.[1]
Publication history
The essay was first self-published by Tomasik in July 2009 under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst" on his website Essays on Reducing Suffering.[2] A revised version was published under Tomasik's name in the peer-reviewed journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015.[3] The Center on Long-Term Risk later republished the essay and lists it as last updated on 24 May 2020; its page also links to the journal version, a podcast version, and translations into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French.[4] In 2018, a French translation by Vincent Bozzolan was published in the journal Les Cahiers antispécistes under the title "L'importance de la souffrance des animaux sauvages".[5]
Summary
Tomasik argues that wild animals are far more numerous than animals living under direct human control, and that the scale and severity of suffering in nature should receive ethical attention and long-term research rather than being treated as a marginal concern in animal advocacy. He surveys sources of suffering in the wild, including predation, chronic fear of predators, disease and parasitism, hunger, cold, injury, and accidents, and discusses how these pressures can shape both day-to-day life and the process of dying.[3]
A central part of the essay concerns population dynamics and high juvenile mortality. Tomasik argues that the most numerous wild animals tend to be small animals with short lifespans, and that many species produce very large numbers of offspring, most of whom die shortly after birth or hatching. He suggests that these patterns may affect the balance of suffering and happiness in nature, and he discusses uncertainty about which animals, and which life stages, are sentient. He also responds to objections to the claim that many wild lives may be net negative, including the argument that net-negative lives would imply widespread suicide among wild animals.[3]
Tomasik discusses ethical and practical questions about human intervention in ecosystems, arguing that humans already affect ecosystems in many ways and that the practical question is often how to compare different forms of interference. He proposes a research agenda focused on welfare assessment, including questions about sentience probabilities across taxa and the frequency and intensity of affective states in the wild, and he considers scenarios in which future technologies could reduce or increase suffering, including proposals that would expand Earth-like ecosystems to other locations and the possibility that detailed simulations could create sentient beings that suffer.[3]
Reception
Faunalytics, an animal advocacy research non-profit, published a summary of the essay in 2016, describing it as an argument that wild-animal suffering is a neglected issue and discussing Tomasik's emphasis on large animal numbers, high juvenile mortality, and the possibility of human influence on ecosystems.[6]
In a 2016 research plan document, the Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly the Foundational Research Institute) described the essay as "seminal" and credited it with motivating further work on wild-animal suffering.[7]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
