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    Caring about particular wild animals

    Pups-in-log_stephenson_usfws-croppedBy Roberta L. Millstein

    In a summer overly stuffed with horrible and depressing news, it's comforting to find a good tidbit here and there. A few of these recent tidbits have been about particular wild animals: A baby orca was born in Puget Sound and given the designation L-120, bringing the population of the "L Pod" up to 79. For the first time in decades, the tracks of a panther were seen in the Green Swamp, north of Polk City, Florida. And the wolf known as OR-7, after famously trekking into northern California before roaming back to Oregon, has found a mate with whom he has produced several wolf puppies.

    People cheer, and are cheered by, these small stories of animal survival and reproduction. Is this silly sentimentalism? I don't think so, although I am not fully certain what to make of it, either.

    Surely many of us, this author included, care deeply about the particular animals who live with us, not as representatives of their species, but for their particular personalities. Of course, none of us know OR-7 or L-120 the way we might know the cats or dogs who live with us. But then again, many people were sad (again, this author included) when Robin Williams committed suicide, even though they didn't know him. So, perhaps it is no more silly or overly sentimental to feel sad about the state-sponsored killing of the alpha wolf female of the Huckleberry Pack in Washington State. (In the latter case, one's sadness might well be mixed with anger).

    Someone might think that what appears to be caring for individual wild animals is really caring for endangered species; wolves, panthers, and orcas are all endangered. Perhaps because the populations are so small, each individual matters so much. An animal's venturing into new territory or reproducing might make a crucial difference for the survival of the species or at least the population. So, we care about them for that reason.

    I think there is something right about this, but I still don't think it fully accounts for why people care about these particular wild animals. Many people are fascinated by the story of OR-7 — a (literally) lone wolf travelling hundreds of miles in search of a mate, to finally find one and have pups, who may themselves find their way to California one day and become California's first resident wolves in decades. (If you don't believe me, read this or this — and yes, a movie is on the way). They follow these stories the same way they might follow those of athletes who overcome adversity and ultimately succeed.

    If I am right — if caring about individual wild animals is not silly sentimentalism and is no more strange than caring about individual humans who we haven't met — what should we make of that as philosophers? Does it have ethical weight?

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    4 responses to “Caring about particular wild animals”

    1. HK Andersen Avatar
      HK Andersen

      This is a really interesting issue. I don’t have anything particularly insightful to add, except to put some more of this on the table to consider alongside your remarks. There is a lot of tension (to put it mildly!) between ranchers and wolves, and wolf advocates who want to help wolf populations recover historical territory they no longer currently occupy. In some places (at least in Montana, and I think in Wyoming too), there were some mechanisms in place to try and alleviate the tension by compensating ranchers for wolf kills. If a calf or cow are taken by local wolves, ranchers can be reimbursed for that value from a fund that was put together by donations for wolf preservation. The idea was supposed to be that this reduced the incentive for ranchers to “shoot, shovel, and shut up”, and minimized the economic impact of wolf kills on local ranchers. Essentially, supporters of the fund made it sound like the ranchers no longer had anything to complain about. But they did keep complaining, and a constant issue that came up was that, even if they made more money than they lost for wolf kills, they still didn’t want the wolves around, because they care about their own animals. A lot of ranchers and ranch hands do know their own cattle in a peculiar and sorta unique way, and even though they are raising them to be sent off for slaughter, still don’t like to see the kind of gruesome and tortuous deaths they undergo with wolves. Their complaint was that even though they got paid, still the wolves were torturing a cow to death, and that was wrong and bothered them as someone who care about the wellbeing of their own cattle.
      One could easily see this coming into conflict – tracking a wolf on the internet through his or her travels, which bring the wolf into direct contact with other animals about which one cares in a different way. One might think that, insofar as it is sentimentalism, it would most likely not survive an up close look at the way charismatic megafauna like wolves, mountain lions, and grizzles actually kill other animals. Caring for two individual animals which end up in ecologically normal predator-prey interactions – even if you know that’s what wolves do, it may change the character of your view by actually seeing it happen, to another animal one cares about.
      There’s also an intriguing argument to be made that ranchers do in fact owe something to their cattle that they do not owe to wild animals, insofar as care is the rancher’s role, in the sense of tending, protecting, taking care of, etc. The cows are under the ranchers’ protection, and the wolves are not. Anyhow, nothing much to conclude here, since I am not sure what to say in general about this, but there are interesting issues here.

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    2. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Thanks for this! It’s good to hear from the rancher perspective. I think you are absolutely right that if its reasonable for us to care about particular wild animals like OR-7, it is certainly reasonable (perhaps even more understandable) for ranchers to care about their particular cattle. And this certainly creates a conflict. Of course, the conflict has always been there for anyone who takes an animal rights perspective, but if we think we have duties to particular animals that might make the conflict even worse.
      I’d like to hope that people aren’t so sentimental that they don’t realize what it is that wolves do to survive. 🙂 Still, no one really wants wolves killing cattle. There are some techniques that people have proposed and used to prevent wolves from killing cattle in the first place. For example, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this NPR piece, which talks about a group in Montana called the Blackfoot Challenge, which is a coalition of landowners, hunters, conservationists and government workers:
      http://www.npr.org/2014/02/08/273577607/montana-ranchers-learn-ways-to-live-with-wolves
      (I have links to some other articles on this topic if you’re interested)

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    3. HK Andersen Avatar
      HK Andersen

      That was an interesting piece. I hadn’t heard about training cows to circle like bison; if it works at all, that is pretty fantastic. (It was also a funny little dig about people in Washington and people who sit in coffeeshops, as all somehow implicated in not understanding how things really are.)
      It sounds like a useful rule to discuss things they agree about 80% of the time, to keep remembering that the people on the other side are also your friends and neighbors (or family members, etc).
      And if you have more links, I’d love to see them. This is a topic close to my heart. It also pops up in interesting ways in other places – I was just hearing someone talk about wolf-farmer issues in central Scandinavia, and they have livestock-wolf issues in Mongolia, too. But in those places, the extreme length of time in which livestock have been grazed has really altered the base ecosystem in which the whole dynamic plays out.

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    4. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Yeah, remembering that there is common ground makes it easier to respect one another when it comes time to talk about the more controversial issues. I particularly like the idea of people from different constituencies coming to the table (literally) to find solutions that they can all live with. It avoids arguments over whose values should trump whose.
      Here are some other pages that describe solutions people have tried to keep wolves away from cattle:
      Fladry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF01SFFufv0
      Removing attractants, loud noises, fladry, dogs, etc. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGOS3VnjZhM&feature=youtu.be
      Range riders, electric fences, etc: http://www.defenders.org/living-wildlife/living-wildlife
      Range riders/close herding: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/01/31/getting-ranchers-tolerate-wolves–its-too-late

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