Positive Duties to Wild Animals: Introduction

ABSTRACT

Though we’ve always known that the wild is a nasty place where predators lethally attack prey, only recently have most animal ethicists come to realize that most wild animals fail to flourish. In fact, what we know about wild animal reproduction suggests that the majority of sentient beings born into the world may not even live lives worth living. It’s not unreasonable for one to initially respond to the above with a sense of depressed resignation, but a growing number ethicists believe that we both can and should intervene. The purpose of this special issue is to further develop the interventionist literature by bringing togeher authors who agree that we owe significant postive duties to wild animals, but who use different theoretical frameworks, or who disagree about the details, e.g., about the reasons that ground our positive obligations to wild animals, about how those positive obligations should be classififed, about the content of our positive obligations, about the means we should use to fulfill our positive obligations, etc.

KEYWORDS:

• Wild animal suffering
• animal welfare
• animal ethics
• intervention
• positive duties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Much of the content in the above paragraphs was taken from Johannsen (2021).