Liminal Animals

Abstract: Historically, conservation has focused on species, ecological communities, systems and processes, rather than on individual animals. Even among advocates for compassionate conservation, the focus on animal welfare or animal rights only relates to conservation activities. However, in recent years the idea of managing ecosystems primarily to improve wild animal welfare has been gaining traction among animal ethicists and animal welfare researchers. Managing ecosystems for animal welfare is generally antithetical to management to support ecological and evolutionary processes, since essential features of those processes, such as predation, privation and competition, are sources of animal suffering. Our aim in this paper is not to defend the proposal that ecosystem management should focus primarily on improving wild animal welfare. It is, rather, to situate this proposal in relation to concerns about wild animal welfare expressed by the public and conservation biologists; to connect it to the rise of subjectivist theories of animal welfare; to introduce the ethical arguments used to support elevating the importance of individual wild animals; to explain the advocacy context; to outline potential implications for conservation; and to review critiques of taking a wild animal welfare focus in ecosystem management.

Mark Wells is an associate teaching professor of philosophy. He has co-authored works in animal ethics such as “Liberty for Corvids” and “A Non-Ideal Argument Against FBOMS (Final Barred Owl Management Strategy)?” as well as papers on a wide variety of topics in applied ethics and ethical theory. In his philosophical work, he focuses on the ways in which ethical theorizing can inform good personal, organizational, and public policy. Recently, his work has focused on the theoretical usefulness of “moral status” as a concept in animal and environmental ethics and how words like “vermin” and “pest” can function as slurs, even when applied to animals.