Predation problem · Lablypedia

Animal ethicists and animal rights theorists have given different responses. Some reject the claim that animal rights imply an obligation to prevent predation, while others argue that predation is a harm that humans should try to avert where this can be done without causing greater harm. A further position is that intervention is not currently justified because of the risk of serious unintended harm, but may become possible with improved knowledge and technology.

Historical views

Problem of evil

Predation has been discussed as a natural evil within the problem of evil and as a moral concern in Christian theodicy. Natural evils have sometimes been treated as harms that humans should alleviate, or as parts of a greater good that justify the existence of such evils. Thomas Aquinas defended the latter view, arguing that "defects" in nature such as predation led to the "good of another, or even to the universal good" and that if "all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe". In Christian and Hebrew Scripture, some prophecies describe a future Heaven or Earth without predation, including Isaiah's prophecy that "[t]he wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them".

In his notebooks, written between 1487 and 1505, Leonardo da Vinci suggested that suffering and death in nature, including plagues and predation, were necessary for renewal and balance in the world, although they could appear unjust or cruel. David Hume referred to predation and the suffering of wild animals in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), writing that the "stronger prey upon the weaker, and keep them in perpetual terror and anxiety".

William Paley, in Natural Theology, described predation as the part of God's work whose utility was hardest to establish. He nevertheless defended predation as a means of limiting the effects of animals producing more offspring than could survive.

Debate about predation and the problem of evil increased after the popularisation of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Some earlier Christians had treated violence in nature as a result of the fall of man, but evidence that predation existed for millions of years before human beings and the concept of sin indicates that life was never free from violence. Darwin questioned how the fact that Ichneumonidae feed on the bodies of living caterpillars could be reconciled with an omnibenevolent God.

Criticism of moral judgements towards predatory animals

Plutarch criticised descriptions of carnivorous animals such as lions, tigers and snakes as barbarous, arguing that killing was necessary for them, while humans could live on "nature's beneficent fruits".

The writer Edward Augustus Kendall discussed predation in his book of moral fables The Canary Bird (1799). He argued that predatory behaviour by animals should not be judged by human moral standards and that "a prejudice against particular creatures, for fancied acts of cruelty is absurd".

Philosophical pessimism

Giacomo Leopardi, the Italian poet and philosopher, discussed predation in Operette morali (1827). In "Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander", he used the image of a squirrel fleeing from a rattlesnake only to run into its open mouth as part of a moral indictment of nature. Such cycles of destruction and creation formed part of Leopardi's philosophical pessimism. In Zibaldone, published posthumously in 1898, Leopardi argued that predation showed the evil design of nature.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, used the suffering of an animal being devoured by another as an argument against the claim that pleasure in the world outweighs pain.

Animal rights

Lewis Gompertz, an early animal rights advocate and one of the first modern writers to discuss wild animal suffering, addressed predation in the fifth chapter of Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824). In a dialogue, he argued that animals devouring each other could be judged wrong by the rules used to govern human conduct, and stated that "should I witness the attempt in any animal of destroying another, I would endeavour to frustrate it; though this might probably be wrong." He also argued that the extinction of carnivorous species would not be bad, because the species of one animal was not more important than an equal number of another, and claimed that some carnivorous animals, such as wolves, could instead live on vegetables.

The American zoologist and animal rights philosopher J. Howard Moore, in the pamphlet Why I Am a Vegetarian (1895), described the carnivora as "relentless brutes" whose existence was contrary to ethics, justice and mercy. In Better-World Philosophy (1899), Moore argued that carnivorousness was the result of excessive egoism produced by natural selection, writing that "Life riots on life-tooth and talon, beak and paw". He also claimed that carnivorous species could not be reconciled with each other in his ideal arrangement of the universe, which he called a "Confederation of the Consciousnesses". In The New Ethics (1907), Moore called carnivorous species "criminal" races whose "existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world", because the "fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others".

In 1903, the Scottish philosopher David G. Ritchie, responding to Henry S. Salt's Animals' Rights (1892), argued that giving animals rights would imply that humans must "protect the weak among them against the strong". He stated that, to do this, carnivorous animals would have to be killed or kept in "permanent captivity and vegetarian diet" until they starved. Ritchie regarded this as absurd, calling "the declaration of the rights of every creeping thing" a "hypocritical formula to gratify pug-loving sentimentalists".

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Contemporary views

Animal ethics

In 1973, Australian philosopher Peter Singer argued that attempts to stop lions killing gazelles would probably increase the "net amount of animal suffering", but added that if humans could reduce suffering in the long term, intervention would be right.

The English philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark's "The Rights of Wild Things" (1979) is considered one of the first ethics papers to address predation directly as a problem. Clark argues that the idea that humans are obligated to aid animals against predators is not absurd, but that it follows only in the abstract and not in practice.

Tom Regan, in The Case for Animal Rights (1983), argued that humans have no obligation to prevent predation because carnivorous animals are not moral agents and therefore cannot violate the rights of the animals they kill. Julius Kapembwa similarly argues that "intervention in predation is neither required nor permitted by animal rights theory".

Steve Sapontzis, in his 1984 paper "Predation", rejects the view that the predation problem is a reductio ad absurdum against animal rights. He argues that if humans accept an obligation to reduce avoidable animal suffering, then predation is something they should work to prevent where they can do so without causing greater suffering. Sapontzis concludes that whether humans should fulfil this obligation or focus on other forms of avoidable suffering depends on where they can do the most good. In a 2003 paper, the economist Tyler Cowen argues, from utility-based, rights-based and holistic perspectives, for policing nature to reduce some predatory activity and aid prey animals.

The transhumanist philosopher David Pearce, in his 2009 essay "Reprogramming Predators", argues that predation is a major source of suffering and that a "biosphere without suffering is technically feasible". He proposes the phased extinction of carnivorous species through immunocontraceptives, or the use of gene editing so that their descendants become herbivores. Pearce criticises several arguments for preserving predation, including what he calls a "television-based conception of the living world", "[s]elective realism" and "[a]daptive empathy deficits".

In 2010, Jeff McMahan published "The Meat Eaters", an op-ed for the New York Times on predation as a moral issue. He argued that preventing the suffering and death caused by predation would be good, and that the extinction of carnivorous species could be instrumentally good if achieved without "ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation". McMahan responded to objections in another op-ed, "Predators: A Response". He later published his arguments as the chapter "The Moral Problem of Predation" in Philosophy Comes to Dinner (2015).

Peter Vallentyne argues that humans may permissibly help prey in limited ways when the cost to humans is minimal, but should not eliminate predators. He compares such aid to helping humans in need when the cost is small.

Martha Nussbaum argues that the predation problem should be treated as a subject for serious discussion and future research. She argues that people should be persuaded that predation is a problem and that cultural portrayals of predation as exciting or enthralling should be challenged. She also rejects the idea that prey animals exist as food for other animals rather than for their own lives. Nussbaum concludes that humans, who have extensive control over animal lives and habitats, have responsibilities toward wild animals and should work toward their flourishing rather than harming them.

Some ethicists have made specific proposals for reducing or preventing predation, including opposing the reintroduction of predators where they have gone extinct, and removing predators from wild areas.

Environmental ethics

In 1984, the British ecologist Felicity A. Huntingford published "Some ethical issues raised by studies of predation and aggression", which discusses ethical questions raised by staging artificial encounters for studies of predator-prey interactions.

In ecology, predation is often treated as a necessary ecological process. This has led some writers, including Michael Pollan, to reject predation as a moral problem; Pollan states that "predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis". Under Aldo Leopold's land ethic, native predators, as components of biotic communities, are considered worth conserving.

The environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott argues that animal rights theory would imply protecting animals from predators, and that this would destroy the community and the species meant to be protected. He writes that many prey species depend on predators to regulate their populations. Holmes Rolston III treats predation as an essential natural process and driver of evolution, a "sad good" to be respected and valued. Ty Raterman argues that predation can be lamented without implying an obligation to prevent it.

The environmental ethicist William Lynn has argued that, from a welfare perspective, predation "is necessary for the well-being of predators and prey" and for the integrity of ecological communities. Larry Rasmussen, a Christian environmental ethicist, has argued that predation is "not a pattern of morality we praise and advocate".

Other uses of the term

"Predation problem" can also refer to predation on animals of economic or conservation value to humans, such as domestic sheep predation by coyotes, farmed salmon predation by seals, predation on animals hunted for sport or food and cat predation of wild animals. Culling or removal of predatory animals may be used to reduce such incidents.