Unknown

"Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. [I]t seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world."

"Although disease and suffering in animals are unpleasant and, perhaps, regrettable, biologists recognize that conservation is engaged in the protection of the integrity and continuity of natural processes, not the welfare of individuals. At the population level, the important processes are ultimately genetic and evolutionary because these maintain the potential for continued existence. Evolution, as it occurs in nature, could not proceed without the suffering inseparable from hunger, disease, and predation. For this reason, biologists often overcome their emotional identification with individual victims. For example, the biologist sees the abandoned fledgling or the wounded rabbit as part of the process of natural selection and is not deceived that "rescuing" sick, abandoned, or maimed individuals is serving the species or the cause of conservation. (Salvaging a debilitated individual from a very small population would be an exception, assuming it might eventually contribute to the gene pool.) Therefore, the ethical imperative to conserve species diversity is distinct from any societal norms about the value or the welfare of individual animals or plants. This does not in any way detract from ethical systems that provide behavioral guidance for humans on appropriate relationships with individuals from other species, especially when the callous behavior of humans causes animals to suffer unnecessarily. Conservation and animal welfare, however, are conceptually distinct, and they should remain politically separate."

"Another time the squirrel raced about with a great wound in his neck where the ferret had caught him. By a miracle the squirrel had escaped. He could not talk because of the pain, but he ran up and down the branches. Everyone could see him. He ran like mad. From time to time he stopped, sat down, raised his forepaws desperately and clutched his head in terror and agony while the red blood oozed on his white chest. He ran about for an hour, then suddenly crumpled up, fell across a branch, and dropped dead in the snow. A couple of magpies flew down at once to begin their meal."

"Another day a fox tore to pieces the strong and handsome pheasant who had enjoyed such general respect and popularity. His death aroused the sympathies of a wide circle who tried to comfort his disconsolate widow. The fox had dragged the pheasant out of the snow, where he was buried, thinking himself well hidden. No one could have felt safer than the pheasant for it all happened in broad daylight. The terrible hardship that seemed to have no end spread bitterness and brutality. It destroyed all their memories of the past, their faith in each other, and ruined every good custom they had. There was no longer either peace or mercy in the forest."

"It was silent in the woods, but something horrible happened every day. Once the crows fell upon Friend Hare's small son who was lying sick, and killed him in a cruel way. He could be heard moaning pitifully for a long while. Friend Hare was not at home, and when he heard the sad news he was beside himself with grief."

"The future really didn't look very bright for Gobo. He was weak. He had always been much more delicate than Bambi or Faline and remained smaller than either of them. He was growing worse from day to day. He could not eat even the little food there was. It made his stomach ache. And he was quite exhausted by the cold, and by the horrors around him. He shivered more and more and could hardly stand up. Everyone looked at him sympathetically."

"Baldner contends that is "arrogant" and "paternalistic" morally to condemn something as definitive of the natural order as predation. However, it is in the nature of morality to devise ideals of a better world and to work toward realizing them. This entails judging this world to be less than ideal and working to change it. One could restrict moral evaluations to the products of human activity, but that would be arbitrary: what makes suffering (prima facie) morally bad is not that it is the result of human activity but that it is suffering. Our commitment to making the world a morally better place impels us to make moral evaluations of the natural order. There need be nothing either arrogant or paternalistic in making and acting on such evaluations, provided we recognize the very limited nature of our understanding and our power to make improvements."

"Something rustled in front of them, close to the ground. The fern fronds and wood-lettuce concealed something that advanced in violent motion. A threadlike, little cry shrilled out piteously; then all was still. Only the leaves and the blades of grass shivered back into place. A ferret had caught a mouse. He came slinking by, slid sideways, and prepared to enjoy his meal."

"Winter dragged on. Sometimes it was warmer, but then the snow would fall again and lie deeper and deeper, so that it became impossible to scrape it away. It was worst when the thaws came and the melted snow water froze again in the night. Then there was a thin slippery film of ice. Often it broke in pieces and the sharp splinters cut the deer's tender fetlocks till they bled."

"Did you see him?" the midges asked each other. "That's the old may-beetle," some of them hummed. Others said, "All of his offspring are dead. Only one is still alive. Only one." "How long will he live?" a number of midges asked. The others answered, "We don't know. Some of his offspring live a long time. They live forever almost... They see the sun thirty or forty times, we don't know exactly how many. Our lives are long enough, but we see the daylight only once or twice."

"Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn's suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn's suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn's suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn's apparently pointless suffering?"

"When our interests or the interests of those we care for will be hurt, we do not recognize a moral obligation to "let nature take its course," but when we do not want to be bothered with an obligation, "that's just the way the world works" provides a handy excuse."

"[S]upposing the Deity to be ... omnipotent—and there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have been sentient. Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions of millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of brutal torture! Is it said that there are compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design."

"Where we can prevent predation without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, we are obligated to do so by the principle that we are obligated to alleviate avoidable animal suffering. Where we cannot prevent or cannot do so without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, that principle does not obligate us to attempt to prevent predation."

"On the the other hand, refusing to accept and affirm, avoidable suffering, unfair distributions of goods, uninhibited aggression, and and so forth, are refusals which have long been and continue to be part of everyday morality. As such, they are a well-established part of life as it is. Animal liberation extends such concerns, which have traditionally been focused on the human world and on human life, to include equal consideration consideration for animals. In this way, animal liberation is simply carrying on the business of everyday moral practice. Therefore, it does not loathe or deny life as it is. Rather, unlike Callicott's proposed retreat to the wilderness, animal liberation is participating in life and, hopefully, in its continuing moral evolution."

"[A]nimals are not just subject to suffering like man, but subject to much more suffering; their existence is considered to be extremely unhappy, not only because they are exploited and tortured by man but also in nature itself, where the weaker one is threatened and devoured by the stronger, and, moreover, because at least many of them live on disgusting food or in uncomfortable places."

"Nature is often perceived as an idyllic, beautiful and peaceful place, where wild animals live in freedom. This romanticized view conceals the fact that wild animals suffer in horrible ways. Far from being idyllic and peaceful, nature is actually "red in tooth and claw": at its heart it's all about competition. Animals are frequently eaten by predators – a horrific, extremely painful death. Food scarcity often leads to starvation, and wild animals endure injury and painful diseases without relief. Nature's cruelty knows no boundaries: For example, gulls peck out the eyes of baby seals, leaving them to die so they can later eat their remains. Some animals use venom to paralyze their prey and eat them piece by piece. Wild animals certainly also experience moments of happiness, but gruesome fates as described above are by no means exceptional. On the contrary, they are rather commonplace in nature, and even if a wild animal manages to avoid them, his or her life is for a large part a constant struggle for survival in a harsh and relentless environment."

"[W]hether we look to animal pleasures or to animal pains, the result is alike just what we should expect to find on the supposition of these pleasures and pains having been due to necessary and physical, as distinguished from intelligent and moral, antecedents; for how different is that which is from that which might have been! Not only might beneficent selection have eliminated the countless species of parasites which now destroy the health and happiness of all the higher organisms; not only might survival of the fittest, in a moral sense, have determined that rapacious and carnivorous animals should yield their places in the world to harmless and gentle ones; not only might life have been without sickness and death without pain;—but how might the exigences and the welfare of species have been consulted by the structures and the habits of one another! But no! Amid all the millions of mechanisms and habits in organic nature, all of which are so beautifully adapted to the needs of the species presenting them, there is no single instance of any mechanism or habit occurring in one species for the exclusive benefit of another species—although, as we should expect on the non-theistic theory, there are some comparatively few cases of a mechanism or a habit which is of benefit to its possessor being also utilised by other species. Yet, on the beneficent-design theory, it is impossible to understand why, when all mechanisms and habits in the same species are invariably correlated for the benefit of that species, there should never be any such correlation between mechanisms and habits of different species. For how magnificent, how sublime a display of supreme beneficence would nature have afforded if all her sentient animals had been so inter-related as to minister to each other's happiness! Organic species might then have been likened to a countless multitude of voices, all singing to their Creator in one harmonious psalm of praise. But, as it is, we see no vestige of such correlation; every species is for itself, and for itself alone—an outcome of the always and everywhere fiercely raging struggle for life."

"What we ought to do depends on what is. The is of nature differs significantly from the is of culture, even when similar suffering is present. A human being in a frozen river would be rescued at once; a human attacked by a wolverine would be flown by helicopter to the hospital. Bison and deer are not humans and we cannot give them identical treatment; still, if suffering is a bad thing for humans, who seek to eliminate it, why is suffering not also a bad thing for bison? We cannot give medical treatment to all wild animals; we should not interrupt a predator killing its prey. But when we happen upon an opportunity to rescue an animal with the pull of a rope, or mercy-kill it lest it suffer, why not? If we can treat a herd of blinded sheep, why not? If we can feed the deer, starving in the winter, why not? That seems to be what human nature urges, and why not let human nature take its course? That seems to be what Jesus urges, doing to others as you would have them do to you, and why not follow the golden rule?"

"A drowning human would have been saved at once, a child with pinkeye given medical treatment. A simple ethics by extension seems too nondiscriminating; we cannot separate an ethics for humans from an ethics for wildlife."

"The Yellowstone ethicists let the bison drown, callous to its suffering; they let the blinded bighorns die. But in the spring of 1984 a sow grizzly and her three cubs walked across the ice of Yellowstone Lake to Frank Island, two miles from shore. They stayed several days to feast on two elk carcasses, when the ice bridge melted. Soon afterward, they were starving on an island too small to support them. This time the Yellowstone ethicists promptly rescued the grizzlies and released them on the mainland, in order to protect an endangered species. They were not rescuing individual bears so much as saving the species."

"When we try to use psychologically based ethics to protect the flora or even the insentient fauna, to protect endangered species or ecosystems, we can only stammer. Wild nature is prolific, but not very compassionate, and what does it mean to respect life at the same time that we value natural processes? A bison fell through the ice into a river in Yellowstone Park; the environmental ethics there, letting nature take its course, forbade would-be rescuers from either saving or mercy killing the suffering animal. When the bighorn sheep of Yellowstone caught pinkeye, were blinded, injured, and starving as a result, 300 bighorns perished, over half the herd. Wildlife veterinarians wanted to treat the disease, but the Yellowstone ethicists left them to suffer, seemingly not respecting their life. Had they no mercy? No respect for life?"

"Letting nature take its ecosystemic course is why the Yellowstone ethic forbade rescuing the drowning bison, but rescued the sow grizzly with her cubs, the latter to insure that the big predators remain. After the bison drowned, coyotes and magpies, foxes and ravens fed on the carcass. Later, even a grizzly bear fed on it. All this is a good thing because the system cycles on, and the great bear, like the wolves, is a sparkling gem in the network. On that account rescuing the whales trapped in the winter ice seems less of a good thing, when we note that rescuers had to drive away polar bears that attempted to eat the dying whales."

"The national park ethic has concluded that a simple extension of compassion from human, and Christian, ethics to wildlife does not appreciate their wildness. Perhaps we are beginning to see the trouble with rescuing those whales. Or maybe we are carrying this let-nature take-its-course ethic to extremes. We are beginning to worship nature. Has ethics here somehow gone wild in the bad sense, blinded by a philosophy of false respect for cruel nature? Can this indifference be the right ethics for wild animals? Can it be godly to say, "Let them suffer!"?"

"The wild animals that share our human world, in particular, live in constant fear. They cannot eat a single mouthful of food without being on their guard. They have many mortal enemies, for all animals prey on each other and there are always hunters, beasts of prey and other threats to life. Hawks kill small birds, small birds kill insects, and so on, continually amassing evil actions in an endless round of killing and being killed."

"The great outer oceans teem with fish, reptiles, turtles, shellfish, worms and other creatures, as numerous as the grains of malt in the bottom of a beer-barrel. There are serpents and monsters so big that their bodies can wind many times around Mount Meru. Other creatures are as small as particles of dust or the tip of a needle. They all undergo immense sufferings. The bigger ones swallow up the smaller ones. The small ones burrow into the big ones and eat them alive in their turn. The big animals all have many tiny ones living inside them, feeding on their flesh. Some of these creatures are born between the continents, where the sun does not shine and where they cannot even see whether their limbs are bent in or stretched out. Stupid and ignorant, they have no comprehension of what to do and what not to do. They are reborn in places where suffering knows no bounds."

"In our guardianship of the rights of animals, must we not protect the weak among them against the strong? Must we not put to death blackbirds and thrushes because they feed on worms, or (if capital punishment offends our humanitarianism) starve them slowly by permanent captivity and vegetarian diet? What becomes of the 'return to nature' if we must prevent the cat's nocturnal wanderings, lest she should wickedly slay a mouse? Are we not to vindicate the rights of the persecuted prey of the stronger? Or is our declaration of the rights of every creeping thing to remain a mere hypocritical formula to gratify pug-loving sentimentalists."

"[F]rom an antispeciesist view, which takes the interests of all sentient animals into account, whether they are human or not, what matters most is how their well-being is affected by our actions and omissions. It follows from this view that we have decisive reasons against performing negative interventions in nature (those with an expected net negative value for nonhuman animals). Similarly, it implies that, whenever it is in our power to do so, and if the intervention is expected to bring about more benefits than harms, we have decisive reasons to intervene in nature with the aim of helping the animals that live there."

"Sound good? Nice parrots. However, they are merely postponing the point at which the red teeth and claws come into the picture. These parrot parents produce more than two offspring. What do you think happens to most of them? They go off and found happy egalitarian parrot families of their own? Maybe for a little while. But a species can't expand indefinitely. Most of these new parrots will get eaten or starve to death. The lucky few will go on to put dozens of new parrots into the world, for natural selection to claw apart and eat alive. r is evil, but K is not so great either."

"This discussion may seem purely abstract; neither the lions' vegan diet nor the fight against their predation is still on the agenda. It is undoubtedly preferable, strategically, to concentrate our efforts on the predation committed by the humans, i.e. on their consumption of meat. However, the way we see predation and the solutions we allow ourselves to imagine are not without consequences. There is a strong symbolic value, it seems to me, to affirm that it would be right to prevent predation, even at the cost of the life of the predator. It can also help us to feel more comfortable with the limited interventions that we can now practice in the wild, for example to protect a mouse from an owl. We may feel uncomfortable asking ourselves in Kant's way if we can want the maxim of our act to be a universal law, which would imply that the owl is starving. Accepting that indeed we may want to universalize this maxim can allow us to act more serenely."

"The suffering and death I saw seemed to me in some meaningful respect lamentable—that is, unfortunate, regrettable, worthy of sadness, the kind of thing it would be better if the world did not involve. What can be said for such a response, and what against it? Can my lamentation be rationally defended as appropriate, or must it be viewed as nothing more than mawkish sentimentalism? How should we view the fact that some animals need to kill other animals in order to live? Can a world in which animals did not kill each other, and indeed did not need to do so in order to live, plausibly be called a better one?"

"Nature, it is urged, is cruel, and careless of the happiness of her millions of subjects. The woods where the poet found refreshment are a battlefield and a slaughter-house for other creatures. [That] pain and fear and bloodshed are a part of the law of life."

"The rescue of individual animals—a couple of whales, a bison, a few deer—is humane enough and does not seem to have any detrimental effects, but that may not be the end of moral considerations, which ought to act on principles that can be universalized. Perhaps it brings these duties into clearer focus to consider populations, herds with hundreds of animals."

"In Ecosophy T there is an ultimate norm "Self-realization!" and an ultimate hypothesis "The higher level of self-realization reached by a living being, the more further increase requires others to reach self-realization." In simple words, it is not a question of acceptance of any kind of life but of "live and let live!" Thanks to the capacities of the human brain, full realization of our potentialities—if there is any limit—cannot be anything like an ego trip but must be a joint venture with other beings, both human and nonhuman. The higher the level of realization, the more the realization is a joint venture, a Self-realization without loss of the individuality of each living being. We have sometimes the potentiality of relieving extreme suffering, human and nonhuman—and we make use of that privilege."

"A likely objection to my proposed long-term attempt to alleviate animal suffering is that it is very risky; the ecological system is too dangerous to tamper with. At our current levels of scientific and technological capabilities, I fully agree with this objection and do not advocate actions in the near future. However, this should not prevent us from aspiring to understanding more and hope to be able to help alleviate animal suffering in the future. Some people may believe that we should never think about tampering with the ecosystem, This may well suit the purpose of our lucky species which appears to enjoy positive welfare. But what if I am right that most other sentient species are suffering enormously? If and when we can confidently reduce their suffering enormously at a small cost and very small risk to ourselves, should we cautiously proceed to help them or should we postpone indefinitely? Analogously, if people in poor countries are suffering enormously from their poverty, and if people in the rich countries can help them develop out of their poverty at a very small risk of aggravating the global environment, should the help be extended? What if you were one of the suffering poor? What if we were one of the suffering species? Let us at least agree that more resources be put into the study of welfare biology."

"This admission of the imperfection of some parasites does not console their victims, however. The situation is relevant in assessing the adequacy of unconditional positive, sometimes highly emotional utterances about nature. What do human beings do when witnessing animals in what they think is unnecessary and prolonged pain? Those who intensely identify with the victims try to rescue them, provided it is not too late and a practical way is seen. The rescue may involve merciful killing by human hands. Generalized, and made into a policy, rescue attempts would amount to an attempt to reform nature. Not everybody studying the consequences of such a policy will accept it as desirable. Because it is totally out of our reach completely to eliminate prolonged extreme suffering, it is of no practical value to discuss its ethical status, but its existence makes general glorification of nature strange to many of us."

"Taking a past “equilibrium” as reference and ideal for all action is literally reactionary, which wouldn't be a problem if this past state of affairs was a paradise; however, nature has never been a paradise, it hasn't been hell either, but it has been largely the realm of claws and teeth."

"Every day some animals become weak and ill and enter a process of dying that involves prolonged pain as far as we can judge from their behavior. When wild reindeer smell large carnivores like bears, wolves, or dogs, they run away quickly. Old and tired reindeer find it more and more exhausting to keep up with the others. The same holds of some of the young ones. If they are caught quickly by carnivores, they tend to get a rapid, merciful death and not a slow, "cruel" one. Some reindeer experience the latter. Having been badly attacked by a winged insect (Cephenomyia trompe), they may die very slowly from suffocation from the growing larvae in their noses."

"I oppose the ecologists because for them, the fox that eats the hare is good, as long as it "preserves the natural balance", while I see the suffering of the hare. You have to have a fairly closed mind to what it represents in reality to find it "good". Environmentalists see in nature only species; without human intervention, these species vary little, at least not visibly; the resulting impression of stability gives a vague feeling of rest and security; and they speak then of the harmony of nature."

"The parasitology of mammals tells us about parasites that kill or maim in ways that elicit intense alarm, disgust, and great negative feelings in us. Evolution specialists tell us that such parasites are not among the most successful and highly developed ones, which thrive without inflicting intense suffering or death on their hosts."

"I hope no such planet exists, but consider one where slow, painful death from parasitism is universal. How would we talk about nature on such a planet? What kind of book would Thoreau have written there?"

"[E]ven if all 7.3 billion human beings on this planet were turned into vegan Buddhas, the problem of wild animal suffering would remain—we would still be surrounded by an ocean of self-conscious creatures that probably even a superintelligence could not liberate."

"[T]here are problems with using any of these definitions of biodiversity as a proxy for animal welfare. Biodiversity is essentially a measure of variety, even if different definitions of biodiversity involve different types of variety. Variety is not the same thing as flourishing. Among humans, this is very clearly true: I can work in a very diverse department (in terms of nationality, gender, philosophical style, etc.) where everyone is miserable. We see the same thing among nonhumans. A region with high biodiversity is full of lots of different kinds of individuals. They might be suffering; their lives might be barely worth living. But if they are alive, they count positively toward biodiversity. The only time welfare will affect biodiversity at all is when it affects either reproduction or mortality to such an extent that the relevant kind of variability in the population is diminished—for example, when a species goes extinct. However, significant effects on welfare happen to species members long before their species goes extinct. To care about biodiversity, then, is to care about the existence or presence of the kinds, not about the welfare of the individuals belonging to those kinds."

"A failure to help that polar bear – or any individual animal in a comparable condition, regardless of our responsibility (direct or indirect) for that suffering – is callous and morally wrong. Nor can lack of action be defended by some alleged concern for the course of nature ('We must not interfere!') or the gene pool of the species ('Let the weak die!'). Consider someone who would use those same arguments to justify not intervening to help relieve the suffering of particular human beings during a famine or after a tsunami, or someone who would use such arguments to say that we should not give antibiotics to a child with pneumonia. Such an attitude, reminiscent of various Charles Dickens characters, would be rejected out of hand as immoral. If the only morally relevant factor is 'can they suffer?', there is no relevant moral difference when animals suffer pain that we can alleviate."

"The terrible pain, suffering, and untimely death caused by events like fire, flood, landslide, hurricane, earthquake, tidal wave, and famine and by diseases like cancer, leprosy and tetanus—as well as crippling defects and deformities like blindness, deafness, dumbness, shriveled limbs, and insanity by which so many sentient beings are cheated of the full benefits of life."

"At least one distinguished ecologist, Ivar Mysterud, and a friend of the reindeer, thinks that even if there were an ecologically very innocent way of heavily reducing the population of a certain parasite that causes extreme pain to the reindeer, or of altering its habits, it should nevertheless not be carried out. The reason: it might disturb a relevant ecosystem. We know too little (the docta ignorantia of a field ecologist!). I agree that there is a presumption against it, but I disagree with his conclusion. The very prolonged, cruel sufferings of the reindeer count more. I am for radically reducing the population of the parasite even if it may be wrong according to L. If an ecosystem is dominated by pain-producing parasites, perhaps we might say its "beauty" diminishes? I am somewhat uncertain about how to interpret the term, and also about the possibility that human beings could preserve or enhance beauty by interfering."

"Torture is permanent in Latin America; is it harmonious? Environmentalists find it good that the fox kills the hare, because that preserves an order. Torture also preserves order."

"It is easy to have an ethics that, instead of questioning things that are difficult to change, decides to call them "good". My ethics, I want to consider it built on real things; happiness and suffering are for me real things, like water or stones, even if current physics does not know them. I cannot then, by convention, baptize anything "good". And also, this implies living in uncertainty, in ethical insecurity. Is it good to kill a snake, to save a large number of frogs? While these eat so many insects? They eat each other or harm plants. I don't know if they suffer, the plants, if they hurt when they choke on each other, poison themselves, get sick shade each other. In many cases, I do not know what is right. Or, what is right is too hard to assume: with each step I risk crushing ants. Maybe I should delete myself, to save ants? I will not do it."

"Faced with the massive destruction of the environment by humans, environmentalists cling to the myth of Mother Nature to be preserved. I am revolted by the extermination of the foxes; this may seem contradictory to my revolt against what hare foxes do. I have a problem there that I cannot solve. And I have others, even more difficult. Why should I, in order to call a problem a problem, be able to suggest a solution, if possible within an hour? No one knows how to beat AIDS, but that does not prevent us from being aware that AIDS is a problem. And above all to seek solutions."

"If, in order to discharge our moral duties, we are obliged to act to prevent harm, then we ought to interfere with nature to stop the suffering and death that occur there. Given the power to create a world free of suffering, or at least in which the amount of suffering is vastly reduced (eg by doing away with hyenas), then we ought to utilize that power. Failure to do so is a culpable omission on our part."