The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
2009 essay by Brian Tomasik
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"The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" is a 2009 essay by the American essayist Brian Tomasik. It argues that suffering among wild animals is large in scale and should be treated as an ethical problem. The essay was first self-published online under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst" on Tomasik's website Essays on Reducing Suffering. A revised version was published in the academic journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015. The essay has also been republished and translated, including a French translation in Les Cahiers antispécistes.
| Author | Brian Tomasik (originally as Alan Dawrst) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | |
| Genre | Essay |
| Published | July 2009 |
| Published in | Essays on Reducing Suffering |
| Text | The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering at the Center on Long-Term Risk |
The essay argues that wild animals greatly outnumber animals on farms, in laboratories, or kept as companions, and that many suffer from natural processes, such as predation, fear of predators, disease, parasitism, hunger, cold, injury, and accidents. Tomasik discusses reproductive strategies, population dynamics, high juvenile mortality, and uncertainty about sentience, and considers whether many wild animal lives may contain more suffering than happiness. The essay also discusses human intervention in ecosystems, research on wild animal welfare, and future technologies that could affect the amount of wild animal suffering.
Background
In an autobiographical essay published in 2012, Brian Tomasik described his interest in wild animal suffering as developing from his engagement with animal ethics and environmentalism in the mid-2000s. He wrote that reading essays by Peter Singer in 2005 led him to take animal suffering more seriously, and that he began to consider how ethical questions about human actions might also apply to wild animals.[1]
Tomasik wrote that later reading, including Bernard E. Rollin's Animal Rights & Human Morality and discussion of pain in invertebrates, contributed to his concern that insects and other invertebrates might be sentient and capable of suffering. He described coming to doubt whether life in the wild usually contains more happiness than suffering. He also cited Gaverick Matheny and Kai Chan's discussion of habitat change and animal welfare, Yew-Kwang Ng's proposal for welfare biology, work in environmental ethics, and David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative as influences on his views. Tomasik wrote that correspondence with Oscar Horta in 2008 influenced his thinking and led to further discussion of wild-animal suffering.[1]
Publication history
The essay was first self-published by Tomasik in July 2009 under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst" on his website Essays on Reducing Suffering.[2] A revised version was published under Tomasik's name in Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015.[3] The Center on Long-Term Risk later republished the essay and lists it as last updated on 24 May 2020. Its page links to the journal version, a podcast version, and translations into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French.[4] In 2018, a French translation by Vincent Bozzolan was published in Les Cahiers antispécistes under the title "L'importance de la souffrance des animaux sauvages".[5]
Summary
Tomasik argues that wild animals are much more numerous than animals under direct human control, and that suffering in nature should receive more research. He surveys sources of suffering in the wild, including predation, chronic fear of predators, disease, parasitism, hunger, cold, injury, and accidents. He also discusses how these conditions affect daily life and death in the wild.[3]
One part of the essay concerns population dynamics and high juvenile mortality. Tomasik argues that the most numerous wild animals tend to be small animals with short lifespans, and that many species produce large numbers of offspring, most of whom die shortly after birth or hatching. He suggests that these patterns may affect the balance of suffering and happiness in nature. He also discusses uncertainty about which animals, and which life stages, are sentient, and responds to objections to the claim that many wild lives may contain more suffering than happiness.[3]
Tomasik also discusses human intervention in ecosystems. He argues that humans already affect ecosystems in many ways, so the practical question is often how to compare different forms of intervention. He proposes research on welfare assessment, including probabilities of sentience across taxa and the frequency and intensity of affective states in wild animals. The essay also considers future scenarios, such as technologies that could reduce or increase suffering, proposals to expand Earth-like ecosystems to other locations, and the possibility that detailed simulations could create sentient beings that suffer.[3]
Reception and discussion
Faunalytics, an animal advocacy research non-profit, published a summary of the essay in 2016. It described the essay as arguing that wild-animal suffering is neglected, and discussed Tomasik's emphasis on animal numbers, high juvenile mortality, and human influence on ecosystems.[6]
In a 2016 research plan, the Center on Long-Term Risk, then the Foundational Research Institute, described the essay as "seminal" and said that it had motivated further work on wild-animal suffering.[7]
Tomasik's original version of the essay has been cited in academic discussions of animal ethics and harms in nature, including by Oscar Horta (2010), Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2013), and Beril Idemen Sozmen (2013).[8][9][10]
The 2015 journal version has been cited in later literature on wild animal suffering and welfare biology, including by Alasdair Cochrane in Sentientist Politics (2018), Kyle Johannsen in Wild Animal Ethics (2020), and Catia Faria in Animal Ethics in the Wild (2022).[11][12][13]