Walden Pod 56 - We probably shouldn't do anything about wild animal suffering
Jul 27, 2022
07:42
Wild animal suffering – is it possible to do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? Even though the general principles that inform our concern for animal welfare shouldn’t be arbitrarily limited to animals outside the wild, I think intervention on any serious scale would be ill-advised. The natural order is deeply interconnected, dynamic, and awesomely complex. Drastic action, such as ending predation, would plausibly cause the system to collapse into nonexistence or end in some other irreversible catastrophe. Sadly, natural evil is inextricably built into the biological order.
“...for practical purposes I am fairly sure, judging from man’s past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it.” - Peter Singer
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Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.