So here is the rest of that exciting piece of work.
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II
Here I will outline four main areas of concern which demonstrate the relevance of regarding animals as embedded in a web of relationships and located in one or more environments.
A. FAMILY
Many young animals (including all mammals and birds) are reliant on parental support at the start of life. But this is not restricted to food and protection. Social learning begins in the family. Young creatures learn what to eat and how to get it; how to relate to conspecifics and how to avoid predation.
The reliance on family may be life-long. For example, orcas who lose a mother before they reach 30 have a greater chance of dying than those who can still rely upon the matriarch (Foster et al. 2012). In the case of elephants, the herd’s survival may be largely dependent on the matriarch: ‘If groups rely on older members for their store of social knowledge, then whole populations may be affected by the removal of a few key individuals.’ (McComb et al. 2001). Adult orcas teach young whale how to safely beach in order to catch seals. This may take years. Older familial members are repositories of knowledge and their loss is a harm done to their family.
The role of the family is not purely a matter of survival but of social and psychological well-being. Young female elephants have to learn ‘consortship’ behaviour from older females (MASSON). Young male elephants without appropriate familial structures show severe psychological damage (BRADSHAW).
In addition, as with humans, emotional well-being relies heavily on social bonds (see, for example, research on allostasis).
COMMUNITY
The wider community is also vital. Territorial birds, like blue tits and crows, who may spend some of their time in family groups or pairs, also gather in unrelated flocks to gain group advantage from predation protection and foraging opportunities (MCDONALD, MCGOWAN). The songs of humpback whales change annually and the new song is spread throughout the population (SAFINA) - while humans do not know the role of the song in humpback whale life, it would seem a harm were whales not able to learn their songs. Elephant families come together in large groups to bond and mate (SAFINA OTHER). Sperm whale pods will come to assist other family groups when they are under attack (SAFINA).
For many animals, there is a critical mass below which the survival of a population is no longer possible. The Allee effect demonstrates that for individuals to survive, they need to exist among sufficient numbers of conspecifics.
The social learning of birds spreads from close socially bonded individuals throughout the sub-population, following the social connectedness of individuals. Where a population is too sparsely spread, such adaptive learning fails to expand and possible survival benefits are lost (see research on social learning among tits).
OTHER ANIMALS
Other species play a part in the survival and well-being of individuals. Grooming birds and the animals they groom present an obvious example. But there are more unexpected pairings: grouper will attract eels to hunt together just as honeyguides (a species of bird that has formed a symbiotic relationship with humans) attract humans and lead them to beehives, which the birds cannot open on their own. Songbirds will nest near the predators of their predators in order to lessen the risk of predation - the loss of raptors thus impacts small birds indirectly.
On a broader scale, many species adapted to a landscape ‘managed’ by a low density of large herbivores whose actions were in turn managed by apex predators. The herbivores create open spaces between trees and do not overgraze because they are moved on by predators. Such movement also allows the spread of seeds in the excreta of the herbivores, thus extending the mosaic-style landscape of woodland and pasture. Old style agriculture led to land management similar enough to the original habitat in the British Isles that many species were able to thrive in non-intensively farmed land. The last half century has changed the terrain and these creatures no longer have the habitats and food sources they require (MCDONALD). Herbivores and then farmers provided the landscape these animals required.
In addition, many species have found that human activities can provide them with more than adequate homes and food sources. The ‘liminal’ animals, the term introduced by Donaldson and Kymlicka, like starlings, rats, urban foxes, crows and so on, would not benefit from being hermetically sealed in a non-human environment. We are part of their habitat.
And, of course, predators depend on the presence of prey; insectivores on the presence of insects; and insects on the presence of appropriate food sources. If those food sources are contaminated through human action, secondary harms occur. For example, rodent poisons kill rodents fairly quickly, but the owls who eat the dying or dead rodents take 17 days to die; fluoxetine from the water course that has got into the soil is absorbed by worms and the starlings who eat the worms lose their sex drive and fail to reproduce.
ENVIRONMENTS
That leads on to the requirement for an appropriate, uncontaminated and large enough habitat, without which the whole web is unsustainable.
Environment can be very specific: migrating birds often seek to nest in precisely the same place where they raised young or were hatched the year before. Knocking down an old barn may prevent a swallow pair from nesting. It can also be very urban: there is a far greater variety of thriving species in Berlin than in the Lake District.
What it cannot be is a monoculture: grouse moors are factories for grouse which support little else; the Lake District is a factory for sheep; much arable land is a factory for grains.
III
The picture presented in the previous section demonstrates that the knowledge and capacities required for both survival and, beyond that, well-being do not reside in an individual animal: they are spread collectively in families, communities and environments. While the individual may be granted certain rights, those cannot exhaust the moral reasons that I am suggesting humans have toward animals.
For example, it seems to me an ethical act to, for example, save the life of an injured bird by providing her with food and safety while a broken bone heals. However, to release that bird into an environment lacking the appropriate nesting sites, where insect numbers have decreased catastrophically through pollution and agro-chemicals and in which the numbers of conspecifics is below the critical mass is simply granting her an extended death sentence. While that does not devalue the action per se it devalues its impact dramatically, and the impact surely matters.
Some animal ethicists are concerned by the suffering of wild animals - through predation, starvation, untended wounds and disease. While it may be pleasing to construct an ideal-world theory that has an answer for every dilemma, the natural world is not ideal. Only a third of birds return from migration; 90% of the dead wildebeest in a given year succumb to starvation not predation; some wasps do lay their eggs inside living prey, so that the hatchlings devour the prey alive while maturing. It seems absurd hubris to think humans can fix all this. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to ascertain by how much total animal suffering has increased (as in percentages of population or percentage of life span suffering) as a result of human action, notwithstanding the fact that some liminal animals have adapted to live in close proximity with humans. Such an investigation is almost impossible as no environments have escaped some human impact and thus there is no comparison to be made. Nonetheless, it seems plausible to assume that habitat loss, fractured animal communities, climate change, pollution and so on have exacerbated the harms. Even liminal animals cannot all be said to be better off than they otherwise would be: in the cases of coyotes and crows, for example, cities are other preferable to the countryside not just for the foraging opportunities but because they are not hunted and killed in cities. Some liminal animals may be making the best of a bad deal.
If humans do have duties to non-domesticated animals, it does not seem unreasonable to prioritise undoing or alleviating human-caused harms first. And, it seems, that would need to be done on a systemic rather than individual basis. It appears that without addressing the ecosystem first, all other interventions would be invalidated. However, instead of granting the ecosystem or species moral value inherently, what I am suggesting here is that the value of the habitat and the community is conferred by the needs of individual animals.
The individual may be the ultimate locus of value, but actions to support individuals, though ethical in themselves, seem unlikely to obtain what those who value animal individuals would see as a truly moral outcome. That truly moral outcome is a world where individual animals have the knowledge and capacities to survive and thrive.
It is, as I said, beyond the scope of this paper to determine how to respond to the complex issue of ethically treating individuals within an interwoven network of other animals with equally morally salient interests, all depending on a web of relationships and varying habitats. Even within a household, we are forced to balance the needs of one with those of another. Sometimes decisions are zero sum games. That the problem is difficult does not suggest that solutions should not be sought. It’s just that life really is more complicated than logical reasoning would like it to be.
CONCLUSION
I appreciate that I have raised problems rather than provided answers. My purpose here is to draw attention to the limitations of much of the theorising in animal ethics when faced with a complex and dynamic reality. However critical it is, and it is, to recognise the individual qua individual, this can only be the starting place for a theory of truly ethical relations between individuals, groups, nations and species.
As a final point, the idea that animals are dependent on family, community, other species and the environment is not true only of non-humans. Instead, the acknowledgement that we humans too are dependent should act as a reminder that we are, after all, animals. It is plausible that constructing an animal-centric theory of ethics might elucidate areas when current theories conceptualised for humans are lacking. I am suggesting that perhaps a third wave animal ethics could prove enlightening for thinking about ethics full stop – instead of animal ethics being human ethics extended out of practical shape. It may be that instead of conceiving ourselves as the supreme being who generously or grudgingly confers rights on lesser creatures, we can perhaps imagine an ethics in which we are a powerful but no less privileged part of a network.
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