Limited Aggregation for Resolving Human-Wildlife Conflicts

ABSTRACT

Human-wildlife interactions frequently lead to conflicts – about the fair use of natural resources, for example. Various principled accounts have been proposed to resolve such interspecies conflicts. However, the existing frameworks are often inadequate to the complexities of real-life scenarios. In particular, they frequently fail because they do not adequately take account of the qualitative importance of individual interests, their relative importance, and the number of individuals affected. This article presents a limited aggregation account designed to overcome these shortcomings and thus to facilitate decision-making in real-world human-wildlife conflicts.

KEYWORDS:

• wildlife management
• limited aggregation
• animal ethics
• zoonotic disease control
• human-wildlife conflicts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The notion that animals count morally, albeit less than humans, seems to be intuitively shared by many humans (Fischer et al., 2021). This is important for our purposes, insofar as we aim to develop an account that is acceptable for most people. Correspondingly, we cannot build our argument on premises that most people intuitively reject.

2. There are other principled accounts in the literature that deal with what we owe to animals, for example Fraser (2012) and Fischer et al. (2021). We exclude them from the discussion here because they do not provide guidance regarding what to do when the interests of humans and animals are in conflict.

3. For further criticism of Sterba’s principles, see Donoso (2017).

4. Non-trivial or basic interests are here understood as interests that concern crucial or essential needs, such as being free from hunger and thirst, bodily integrity, well-being, and being free from pain and suffering. This category encompasses interests that have a significant impact on one’s life and welfare. Non-basic or trivial interests are interests that are not crucial for one’s welfare and survival. Their fulfillment would be nice to have, but one’s welfare is not significantly affected by their frustration (examples are a reduced range of food choices, being interrupted in entertainment activities, and the like). We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify this point.

5. Some authors in the aggregation literature refer to ‘claims’ (an example being Voorhoeve (2014)), while others talk about ‘interests’ (for example, Norcross (2009)). For our present purpose, we use the language of ‘interests’, as it is uncontroversial that sentient animals have interests, while it is more controversial that they have ‘claims’, i.e. morally protected interests.

6. For criticisms of limited aggregation, see Broome (2004), Norcross (1997), Parfit (2003), and Tomlin (2017).

7. How much a harm or interest X of humans matters more than the harm or interest X of animals depends on the specific animal species. The reason is that we endorse here a hierarchical understanding of moral status. While the harm or interest X of humans counts likely only slightly more than the harm or interest X of primates, the same harm or human interest X counts more than the harm or interest X of fish. The exact numerical value of human interests and interests of different animal species has to be determined elsewhere, though. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify this point.

8. We acknowledge that it would be desirable to provide the exact numbers for all sorts of human-animal conflicts. However, we cannot provide these numbers here, as their determination is a project on its own. In addition, most seminal articles in the aggregation literature do not provide exact numbers either (yet). Hence, we can only provide rough numbers for illustrative purposes here. We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to clarify this point.

9. Admittedly, whether culling is justified also depends on the spill-over risk and on the severity of disease in humans and animals. We discuss the role of risk more in detail in section 6.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung with Grants 179826 and 100012_197363/1.