Wild animal suffering

History of views on wild animal suffering

Religious and theological views

Christianity and natural theology

Animal suffering has long been discussed in connection with the problem of evil and divine providence. In 1709, English naturalist and clergyman Thomas Robinson discussed predation in relation to divine providence. He acknowledged that prey animals could be torn apart and eaten alive, but defended predation as part of the intended order of nature, arguing that carnivorous animals were adapted to their place in creation and that predation regulated animal populations.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume drew attention to predation as part of his criticism of arguments for a benevolent ordering of nature, describing animals as keeping one another in "perpetual terror and anxiety". William Paley, by contrast, defended a providential interpretation of nature in Natural Theology (1802). Although he acknowledged that animals died through violence, disease, starvation, and other causes, he argued that predation formed part of a divinely ordered system and served to regulate animal populations.

Islam

In Islamic philosophy and theology, animal suffering has also been considered in relation to the problem of evil. One Shia theodicy argues that animal suffering can be justified if it produces benefits and if animals are compensated after death on the Day of Judgment.

Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism

Ole Martin Moen argues that Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism regard suffering as bad for those who experience it and present the natural world as containing extensive suffering.

In Buddhist doctrine, rebirth as an animal is regarded as undesirable because animals suffer from both human and natural causes. Animal suffering has also been interpreted as an example of dukkha. Buddhist writers including Shantideva and Patrul Rinpoche described animals as vulnerable to predation, fear, and other harms, and as beings toward whom compassion should be directed. Calvin Baker argues that wild animal suffering presents difficulties for both traditional Buddhist accounts involving rebirth and naturalized forms of Buddhism that reject it.

Lisa Kemmerer argues that Hindu literature presents animals as conscious beings connected to humans and gods. She discusses texts including the Vedas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Panchatantra, and relates reincarnation, karma, and ahimsa to duties of compassion and non-injury toward animals. Michael C. Morris and Richard H. Thornhill argue that some Hindu texts provide doctrinal support for the view that spiritual sanctity can reduce conflict among animals.

Early modern views

Leonardo da Vinci repeatedly described nature as involving conflict, predation, and death among animals. In his notebooks, he characterized nature as at times "rather a cruel stepmother than a mother" and observed that animals survive through the deaths of others. He asked why nature had not arranged that "one animal should not live by the death of another", and answered that nature continually produces new life while disposing of organisms through predation, disease, and other causes.

In Histoire Naturelle, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, described wild animals as exposed to hunger, harsh winters, exhaustion, parasites, and other sources of suffering. He nevertheless defended predation as a means of limiting populations that would otherwise increase beyond available resources.

Nineteenth century

Moral critiques of nature

In Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), Lewis Gompertz argued for an egalitarian view of human and non-human animals and considered whether humans should assist animals suffering in the wild. He described both humans and other animals in a natural state as vulnerable to starvation, predators, injury, adverse weather, and illness without reliable assistance, and stated that he would attempt to save an animal being killed by another animal, although he expressed uncertainty about the morality of doing so.

Giacomo Leopardi and Arthur Schopenhauer used suffering among wild animals in pessimistic accounts of nature. Leopardi described predation and the destruction of living beings as part of a natural cycle in which the preservation of some organisms depends on the suffering and death of others, and argued that this conflicted with portrayals of nature as ordered for the happiness of living beings. Schopenhauer likewise treated predation as evidence for the predominance of suffering over pleasure, suggesting that the pleasure of an animal eating another should be compared with the suffering of the animal being eaten.

In the essay "Nature", published posthumously in 1874, John Stuart Mill rejected the view that nature provides a moral standard, observing that many acts condemned among humans are commonplace in the natural world. He described animals as divided into "devourers and devoured" and argued that harmful natural processes should not be accepted merely because they are natural.

In Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), Henry Stephens Salt argued that wild animals have a claim to live unmolested and uninjured unless they directly threaten human welfare. He allowed action in self-defense or to prevent serious harm but rejected needless killing and torment.

In Better-World Philosophy (1899), J. Howard Moore criticized natural selection for producing predation, competition, and suffering among animals. He argued that humans should use their intellectual and moral capacities to reduce these harms where possible. In The Universal Kinship (1906), Moore again described the living world as pervaded by suffering arising from the processes through which life had developed and suggested that human concern for other beings could improve conditions in nature.

Evolution and suffering

Charles Darwin discussed animal suffering in relation to both natural selection and the problem of evil. In his autobiography, Darwin maintained that happiness generally predominated among sentient beings, reasoning that prolonged pain reduces an animal's capacity for action while pleasurable sensations can serve as recurring guides to behavior. He nevertheless acknowledged that animals sometimes suffer greatly and argued that natural selection favors reproductive success rather than freedom from suffering. In an 1860 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote that he could not reconcile a benevolent and omnipotent God with the intentional creation of Ichneumonidae, whose larvae feed within living caterpillars, or with cats playing with mice.

In A Candid Examination of Theism (1878), George Romanes treated competition, predation, parasitism, hunger, and disease among sentient animals as an objection to divine benevolence. Thomas Henry Huxley similarly described predation, disease, old age, and overpopulation in "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" (1888), rejecting the claim that later products of evolution could compensate earlier animals for their suffering. In Evolution and Ethics (1893), he argued more generally that ethical progress depended on resisting rather than imitating the "cosmic process".

Other evolutionists defended the processes responsible for suffering. In Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought (1888), Joseph Le Conte treated suffering in the animal kingdom as part of the problem of evil but argued that struggle against an adverse environment was necessary for organic evolution and could be regarded as good in relation to its results. In Darwinism (1889), Alfred Russel Wallace argued that accounts of suffering produced by the struggle for existence were exaggerated. He maintained that wild animals generally lacked anticipatory fear of death, that violent deaths were often rapid, and that natural selection tended to produce abundant life with comparatively little suffering. He developed this position in The World of Life (1910), arguing that pain had evolved only to the degree needed for survival and that predation generally involved limited suffering. André Luis de Lima Carvalho interprets Wallace's account as part of his attempt to reconcile Darwinian evolution with a spiritualist theology involving divine benevolence.

Twentieth century

In Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913), William Temple Hornaday described wild animals as vulnerable to climate, starvation, and disease, discussing birds dying in freezing rain, wild ducks suffering from hunger and cold, and disease among several mammal species. In The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922), he described fear as the "ruling passion" of wild animals and proposed a "Bill of Rights for Wild Animals".

In "Which Shall We Protect? Thoughts on the Ethics of the Treatment of Free Life" (1952), Alexander Skutch discussed several possible principles governing human relations with free-living animals, including laissez-faire, ahimsa, and what he called "harmonious association". He favored an approach combining these principles.

Emergence of the intervention debate

From the 1970s, questions about duties toward wild animals became part of debates between animal ethicists and environmental ethicists. In 1973, Peter Singer addressed whether humans should prevent predation, stating that intervention would be justified if it produced better consequences while warning of the risk of increasing suffering in the long term. Stephen R. L. Clark argued that humans should protect wild animals from serious dangers but were not required to regulate all natural interactions. J. Baird Callicott contrasted animal liberation with Aldo Leopold's land ethic, drawing attention to conflicts between concern for individual animals and holistic environmental approaches.

Later writers including Steve F. Sapontzis, Arne Næss, and David Olivier also considered whether humans have duties toward animals suffering from natural processes.

Twenty-first century

Publications and research

In 2009, Brian Tomasik published "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering", arguing that wild animals greatly outnumber animals under direct human control and that animal advocates should give greater attention to their suffering. Jeff McMahan subsequently addressed the moral problem of predation in "The Meat Eaters".

In 2015, Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism published a special issue on wild animal suffering and intervention in nature, which included a revised version of Tomasik's essay. Catia Faria's doctoral thesis and later book Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature argue that humans have obligations to assist wild animals. Kyle Johannsen's Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering likewise argues for intervention to reduce wild animal suffering, and Johannsen later edited Positive Duties to Wild Animals.

Organizations and institutions

Organizations working on wild animal suffering include Animal Ethics and Wild Animal Initiative. Wild Animal Initiative was formed in 2019 through the merger of Utility Farm and Wild-Animal Suffering Research. In September 2022, New York University launched a Wild Animal Welfare Program to study how human activity and environmental change affect the welfare of wild animals.

Ethics of intervention

Animal ethics and environmental ethics

A disagreement between some approaches in animal ethics and environmental ethics concerns their objects of moral concern. Animal ethics generally focuses on the interests or welfare of individual animals, while environmental ethics may give moral weight to species, ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural processes. These priorities can conflict over practices including hunting as population management, predator reintroduction, possible modification of carnivores or r-selected species, and the preservation or reduction of habitats. Bob Fischer similarly argues that measures that benefit individual animals may conflict with goals such as species preservation, biodiversity, or climate protection.

Werner Scholtz argues that individual-centered animal rights can conflict with holistic environmental approaches. He proposes group-based rights for wild animals as a way of reconciling animal protection with biodiversity conservation, while arguing that such rights do not entail eliminating all natural suffering.

Predation as a moral problem

Predation has been used as a test case for the implications of animal ethics beyond human-caused harms. Some philosophers argue that, if humans have duties to save animals from serious harms, these duties can in principle apply when the threat is another animal. Others deny that preventing predation is ethically required, argue that intervention could produce greater ecological harms, or present predation as a challenge to theories of animal rights. Jeff McMahan argues that intervention against predation may not currently be advisable because of uncertainty about its effects, while maintaining that greater knowledge and technological capacity could alter this assessment.

Arguments for intervention

Some arguments for intervention are based on animal rights or welfare. Rights-based arguments hold that rights such as life or bodily integrity may provide reasons to protect animals from serious harms caused by other animals. Tom Regan, however, argues that non-human animals are not moral agents and therefore cannot violate one another's rights. Welfare-based arguments instead hold that intervention can be justified when it is expected to reduce suffering without causing greater harms.

Connor K. Kianpour and Eze Paez argue that several approaches to animal rights can permit large-scale modification of nature to improve wild animal welfare under some circumstances, even if those approaches do not establish a duty to undertake such interventions.

Other arguments appeal to consistency or impartiality. Catia Faria and Eze Paez argue that refusing assistance to wild animals while assisting humans in comparable circumstances can reflect speciesism. Jamie Mayerfeld argues that an impartial duty to relieve suffering extends to animals harmed by natural processes. Oscar Horta argues that humans already intervene extensively in nature for human and environmental purposes, and questions treating interventions aimed at helping wild animals differently.

Arguments based on human responsibility distinguish between harms caused or intensified by humans and harms arising independently of human activity. Martha Nussbaum argues that human effects on animal habitats generate responsibilities toward affected animals, while also suggesting that duties of assistance can extend to animals suffering from disease, natural disasters, and other natural causes. Jeff Sebo argues that wild animals experience both human-caused and natural harms, with some harms being increased by climate change. Steven Nadler argues that obligations to help individual wild animals need not depend on whether humans caused their suffering. Bob Fischer argues that caring relationships with wild animals can generate special responsibilities to assist them, discussing cases in which animals had become dependent on food provided by humans.

Faria has also developed a gender-sensitive account of wild animal ethics. She criticizes approaches that subordinate individual animals to ecological wholes or treat autonomy as requiring non-interference. Drawing on a relational account of autonomy, she argues that assistance can in some circumstances expand the options available to wild animals.

Arguments against intervention

Ecological uncertainty and unintended consequences

A practical objection is that ecosystems are complex and the consequences of intervention can be difficult to predict. Aaron Simmons argues that interventions intended to save wild animals could damage ecosystems or cause greater numbers of animal deaths. Peter Singer argues that intervention would be justified if it could be expected to substantially reduce suffering and death in the long term, but cautions that interference with ecosystems may instead cause greater harm.

Concerns about intervention have also been expressed in terms of arrogance, playing God, and unforeseen consequences. Beril Sözmen responds that uncertainty does not establish that all interventions should be rejected, while Nussbaum argues that humans already intervene extensively in nature and that the relevant question is what forms of intervention are appropriate. Tyler Cowen similarly argues that, because humans already alter nature, ethical evaluation should concern which interventions are preferable, rather than whether intervention occurs at all. McMahan argues that human influence on nature can provide reason to favor changes expected to reduce suffering.

Value of natural processes and wildness

Some environmental ethicists give moral value to ecological processes, wilderness, or wildness independently of the welfare of individual animals. Holmes Rolston III argues that suffering can form part of ecologically valuable natural processes and that humans do not have a general duty to prevent suffering arising independently of human action. Rolston also defends predation in terms of the ecological roles of carnivores. Yves Bonnardel criticizes this approach, arguing that the concept of nature can function ideologically by treating animals as bearers of ecological functions rather than as individuals with interests.

Laissez-faire and limited duties

A laissez-faire position, defended in different forms by Regan, Elisa Aaltola, Clare Palmer, and Ned Hettinger, holds that humans have duties not to harm wild animals but do not have a general duty to protect them from naturally occurring harms. Faria argues that restricting duties of assistance to harms caused by humans would have implications for comparable cases involving humans and companion animals who suffer from natural causes.

Sovereignty and paternalism

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, in Zoopolis, argue against large-scale interventions intended to manage wild animal societies, on the grounds that wild animals should be treated as sovereign communities capable of self-government. Oscar Horta argues that many wild animal populations do not constitute political communities and that sovereignty, where applicable, has instrumental rather than intrinsic value.

Estiva Reus compares proposals to reform nature for the benefit of wild animals with colonial arguments that populations described as "backward" should be governed by those claiming superior knowledge and ability. Thomas Lepeltier rejects the analogy, arguing that colonialism involved domination, dispossession, and benefits to colonizers that are absent from proposals intended solely to assist suffering animals.

Explanations for non-intervention

Some advocates of intervention argue that attitudes toward wild animal suffering are influenced by assumptions about nature as predominantly beneficial or harmonious. Horta argues that romanticized views of nature can contribute to opposition to interventions intended to reduce suffering. Other writers have proposed that appeal to nature, status quo bias, scope neglect, omission bias, speciesism, anthropocentrism, doubts about feasibility, and limited attention to invertebrate welfare can contribute to the relative neglect of wild animal suffering.

Relationship with conservation

The welfare of individual wild animals has historically had a limited role in conservation biology, which has generally focused on the preservation of species, populations, ecological communities, biodiversity, and evolutionary processes. Concern for individual welfare within conservation has more commonly addressed harms associated with human activities, such as entanglement, pollution, habitat destruction, and human-related disease outbreaks, rather than suffering caused by natural processes.

Compassionate conservation gives greater consideration to the welfare of individual animals and argues that conservation practices should avoid unnecessary harm. Its proponents nevertheless generally retain biodiversity and ecological integrity as conservation goals, with concern for individual welfare affecting how those goals are pursued.

An approach based on reducing wild animal suffering differs in treating the welfare of sentient individuals as an objective in its own right, including when suffering results from natural processes such as predation, disease, starvation, and competition. Advocates have therefore considered forms of ecosystem management intended primarily to improve animal welfare rather than to conserve species or ecosystems.

This approach has been debated within conservation biology. Its proponents argue that conservation decisions should give greater weight to the welfare of individual sentient animals and that research could identify interventions capable of improving their welfare. Critics argue that making welfare an independent objective could conflict with biodiversity conservation, alter established conservation priorities, and involve ecological risks where the effects of intervention are difficult to predict.

Interventions in practice

Existing interventions that can affect the welfare of wild animals include medical treatment, vaccination, care for orphaned animals, rescue, disaster response, provision of food, water or shelter during emergencies, and contraception to regulate population sizes.

Direct aid and rescue

Some communities have traditions of assisting wild animals. The Bishnoi, a Hindu sect founded in the fifteenth century, feed wild animals, and some Bishnoi temples operate rescue centres for injured animals. The Borana Oromo people leave water out overnight for wild animals because they regard them as having a right to drink.

Large-scale rescues have included Operation Breakthrough, in which the United States and Soviet governments attempted to free three gray whales trapped in ice off Alaska; the rescue of baby flamingos during drought in South Africa; wildlife rescues during the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season; and rescues of stranded whales, abandoned Cape cormorant chicks and cold-stunned sea turtles.

Disease and population management

Vaccination programmes have been used to control rabies and tuberculosis in wild animal populations. Wildlife contraception has been used to reduce or stabilise populations of wild horses, white-tailed deer, American bison and African elephants.

Culling has sometimes been justified partly on animal-welfare grounds. In 2002, the Australian government authorised the killing of 15,000 kangaroos trapped within a fenced military base where animals were suffering from illness and starvation. In 2016, rangers at Kruger National Park killed starving hippos and buffaloes during a severe drought; preventing prolonged suffering was given as one reason for the measure.

One large-scale disease-control programme was the eradication of the New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) from North and Central America. Beginning in the 1950s, the United States Department of Agriculture used the sterile insect technique to release sterilised males and disrupt reproduction. The programme was designed principally to protect livestock, but the parasite also infested wild animals, and its eradication affected wild populations as well as livestock.

Research and proposals

Welfare biology and wild animal welfare science

Yew-Kwang Ng proposed welfare biology in 1995, defining it as "the study of living things and their environment with respect to their welfare (defined as net happiness, or enjoyment minus suffering)". Catia Faria and Oscar Horta describe welfare biology as a field concerned with the welfare of animals in relation to natural ecosystems and with research that could inform ways of helping them.

A related research area is wild animal welfare science. In 2026, Vittoria Elliott and colleagues described wild animal welfare science as an emerging interdisciplinary field that applies methods from animal welfare science, ecology, animal behaviour, and related disciplines to the welfare of wild animals.

Proposed interventions

Some writers argue that existing forms of assistance could be expanded if research indicated that doing so was feasible and would not increase suffering overall. Kyle Johannsen has proposed that, with sufficient research, CRISPR and gene drives could be used to alter reproductive patterns among animals with high juvenile mortality, while stressing that intervention should be constrained by uncertainty about ecological effects. Magnus Vinding has considered genetic and other forms of biological modification intended to reduce severe suffering, while comparing them with approaches intended to reduce future animal populations.

Some authors have also considered interventions aimed at reducing suffering from predation, including predator population management, avoiding some predator reintroductions, and hypothetical genetic modification of predatory behaviour.

Proposals concerning conservation practice include opposition to some forms of rewilding. Ole Martin Moen argues that rewilding can produce avoidable suffering, while Josh Milburn argues that preventing rewilding or implementing forms of "dewilding" may sometimes be preferable where wild animals depend on environments created by previous human activity.

A more controversial argument concerns the amount of habitat available to wild animals. Brian Tomasik has argued from a consequentialist perspective that, if wild animal lives contain more suffering than positive experiences, reducing habitat could reduce total suffering. Tyler M. John and Jeff Sebo discuss and criticize this position under the label "Logic of the Logger".

Future risks

Some authors have considered the possibility that human activity could spread wild animal suffering beyond Earth. Proposed scenarios include the creation of self-sustaining ecosystems on extraterrestrial colonies or terraformed planets. Gary David O'Brien has considered directed panspermia as another possibility, arguing that introduced microbial life could eventually evolve into sentient organisms capable of suffering.

Cultural depictions

Wildlife documentaries

Some writers have argued that wildlife documentaries give a selective representation of wild animal suffering. Philipp Ryf argues that documentaries tend to focus on charismatic animals, adults, and visible predator-prey encounters, while giving less attention to small animals, invertebrates, young animals, disease, parasitism, and injuries following predator attacks. Ozy Brennan similarly argues that some sources of suffering among wild animals receive relatively little attention in representations of nature.

Toni Muñoz argues that wildlife documentaries commonly present nature as something to be observed and protected without intervention, and portray hardships as obstacles overcome through adaptation. David Pearce criticizes wildlife documentaries for aestheticizing animal suffering and presenting natural violence through narration, music, and narrative structures that make it more acceptable to viewers. Clare Palmer argues that depictions of wild animal suffering do not usually produce the same expectation of human assistance as comparable suffering among companion animals, which she associates with a laissez-faire view towards wild animals.

David Attenborough has stated that wildlife documentaries omit substantial amounts of violence during editing. Whether documentary filmmakers should intervene to assist suffering animals has also been debated. Non-intervention has been described as a convention of wildlife filmmaking, although filmmakers have sometimes intervened to rescue animals, including stranded penguins and baby turtles.

Literature

Historian of science Antonello La Vergata argues that Western writing about nature has repeatedly used images of "nature's war" and the "economy of nature" to interpret death, destruction, and pain in the living world. He traces these themes through natural history, philosophy, and literary and moral writing.

In his 1756 Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, Voltaire presents sentient beings as sharing a condition of suffering and describes a sequence in which predators themselves become prey. Jacques Marckert interprets the passage as a food chain in which each predator is a potential victim and as part of Voltaire's rejection of philosophical optimism. Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature describes predation and competition among animals and characterizes the world as a "great Slaughter-house". Hernández-Avilez and Ruiz-Gutiérrez discuss the passage as an early depiction of the struggle for existence that later attracted the attention of Charles Darwin.

In Queen Mab (1813), Percy Bysshe Shelley imagines a transformed natural world in which predatory relations have disappeared. Robert Mitchell interprets the poem's transformed animals and landscapes as part of a broader vision in which humans reshape nature. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville depicts the sea as a place of continual predation, including what he describes as "universal cannibalism".

In Bambi, a Life in the Woods, Felix Salten portrays predation and death as recurring features of animal life. Historian Ralph H. Lutts argues that the Disney adaptation reduced the roles of predation and starvation while presenting humans as the principal danger to the animals. Roberta Grandi describes Watership Down as immersing the reader in the natural history of rabbits, whose lives include continual encounters with predators as well as destructive human activity. Hollie Adams compares adaptations of Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood, discussing their depictions of violence, death, displacement, and human effects on wild animals.

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm have been interpreted in relation to violence in nature. Joanna Smith argues that Dillard depicts nature through predation, parasitism, and death, and examines the relationship between these processes and divine presence. Robinson Jeffers also depicted violence and suffering in the natural world. Robert Zaller discusses poems including "Hurt Hawks" as part of Jeffers's engagement with the implications of a Darwinian conception of nature.