Nature

"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."

"Is there not a teaching of nature very apt to suggest horror and despair rather than a complacent brooding over soothing thoughts?"

"Hobbes clearly proves that ev'ry Creature Lives in a State of War by Nature. The Greater for the Smallest watch, But meddle seldom with their Match. A Whale of moderate Size will draw A Shole of Herrings down his Maw. A Fox with Geese his Belly crams; A Wolf destroys a thousand Lambs."

"For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."

"The Gods! but they, the shadows of ourselves, Have past for ever. It is Nature kills, And not for her sport either. She knows nothing. Man only knows, the worse for him! for why Cannot he take his pastime like the flies? And if my pleasure breed another’s pain, Well—is not that the course of Nature too, From the dim dawn of Being—her main law Whereby she grows in beauty—that her flies Must massacre each other? this poor Nature!"

"Is there anything we can do about animal suffering in wildlife? There was a time when many said that nothing should be done to obviate human suffering, since attempts to establish a welfare state would either be in vain, jeopardise what kind of welfare there happens to exist, or produce perverse (even worse) results. We rarely meet with that reaction any more. However, many seem to be ready to argue that wildlife constitutes such a complex system of ecological balances that any attempt to interfere must produce no good results, put into jeopardy whatever ecological 'balances' there happen to exist, or perversely make the situation even worse. This is not the place to settle whether they are right or not, but, certainly, there must exist some measures we could take, if we bothered to do so, rendering wildlife at least slightly less terrible. If this were so, we should do so, according to utilitarianism."

"If we humans could 'civilize' wildlife, and provide better living and dying conditions to non-human animals, then we ought to do so. We ought to side with the lamb against the wolf."

"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."

"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."

"... wild animals suffer from a wide range of harms regardless of their reproductive strategies, including hunger, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters. These harms often cause intense suffering, and we should not disregard this suffering merely because the sufferers happen to live in the wild, or because they happen to have non-human bodies. We rightly acknowledge a moral duty to relieve intense suffering experienced by humans, including when it is due to natural causes, and there is no justification for restricting this moral duty to humans only ... ."

"There is, to be sure, a risk that interventions to help wild animals will end up making things worse, which highlights the importance of a well-informed and cautious approach to compassionate intervention. Yet this is very different from a stance of moral defeatism that simply dismisses the issue out of hand."

"Elements, animals, humans, everything is at war."

"There is, perhaps, no way in which one can obtain a more vivid idea of the intensity of the struggle for existence among organic beings than by the study of the inhabitants of a freshwater pond of long standing. Every inch of space in such a situation is teeming with life, both animal and vegetable, and the chief delight of most of the animals present is to wage a ceaseless warfare upon their weaker fellows."

"[T]here were no birds or beasts of prey; none that destroyed or molested another."

"When it comes to wild animals, though, only the last [expression of normal behaviour] is guaranteed. They have to struggle to survive on a daily basis, from finding food and water to another individual to mate with. They don't have the right to comfort, stability, or good health. ... By the standards our governments have set, the life of a wild animal is cruelty."

"For whatever praise you may hear, whatever love you may profess for the sea and mountains, the desert or marshes, plants and animals, nature doesn’t behave as a friend to humans or even as their symbiont. By means of waves, fire, typhoons, poisoning or devouring, it kills as calmly as bodies fall and eagles eat lambs. It doesn’t pardon any mistake."

"Man and animals are really the passage and the conduit of food, the sepulchre of animals and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead [bodies]."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Whatever we say about [wild animal suffering], it shows us once again that the positive/negative distinction cannot be maintained in anything like its classical form. Humans are intervening in animals' lives all the time, and the question can only be what form this intervention should take. An intelligently respectful paternalism is vastly superior to neglect."

"It seems plausible that we have less responsibility to protect gazelles than we do to protect domestic dogs and cats, since we are the guardians of the latter and they have evolved in symbiosis with us. But where we can protect gazelles without the type of massive intervention that would be harm-producing, perhaps we should do so. The problem is that the needs of the predatory animal must also be considered, and we do not have the option of giving the tiger in the wild a nice ball on a string to play with."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"The death of a gazelle after painful torture is just as bad for the gazelle when torture is inflicted by a tiger as when it is done by a human being. That does not mean that death by tiger is as blameworthy; obviously it is not. But it does suggest that we have similar reasons to prevent it, if we can do so without doing greater harms. The capabilities approach is entitlement-based and outcome-oriented. One way of preventing gruesome deaths of animals at the hands of other animals is to put all vulnerable animals (or, alternatively, all predators) in protective detention, so to speak."

"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."

"There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves as ends, and of others as their means—the refusal to recognize the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others would not act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe."

"The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this individual, as the world's executive, continues to determine its phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world, what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while."

"Yes, do as you would be done by—and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low enough nor far enough to find those whose bowed and broken beings will not rise up at the coming of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink and darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you. Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird, and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught creatures! Into their dim and lowly lives strays of sunshine little enough, though the fell hand of man be never against them. They are our fellow-mortals. They came out of the same mysterious womb of the past, are passing through the same dream, and are destined to the same melancholy end, as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful to them."

"The chief activities of beings, both human and non-human, are put forth, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of procuring food. The suppression, entire or partial, of one being by another for nutritive purposes is, therefore, the form of the most frequent and excessive egoism. The lowly forms of life—the worms, echinoderms, mollusks, and the like—are, for the most part, vegetarians. So, also, are prevalently the insects, birds, rodents, and ungulates. These creatures are not, as a rule, aggressively harmful to each other, chiefly indifferent. But upon these inoffensive races feed with remorseless maw the reptilia, the insectivora, and the carnivora. These being-eaters cause to the earth-world its bloodiest experiences. It is their nature (established organically by long selection, or, as in the case of man, acquired tentatively) to subsist, not on the kingdom of the plant, the natural and primal storehouse of animal energy, but on the skeletons and sensibilities of their neighbors and friends. The serpent dines on the sparrow and the sparrow ingulfs the gnat; the tiger slays the jungle-fowl and the coyote plunders the lamb; the seal subsists on fish and the ursus maritimus subsists on seal; the ant enslaves the aphidae and man eats and enslaves what can not get away from him. Life riots on life—tooth and talon, beak and paw. It is a sickening contemplation, but life everywhere, in its aspect of activity, is largely made up of the struggle by one being against another for existence—of the effort by one being to circumvent, subjugate, or destroy another, and of the counter effort to reciprocate or escape."

"All over the non-human world, with few exceptions, each being seeks the satisfaction of his own desires, if not with positive disregard for the happiness and misery of the rest of the universe, at least with sincere unconcern. There is no courtesy, sympathy, or amenity there—a cold, heartless, implacable world of strangers."

"Hardships have come. They have come from the inanimate universe in the form of floods, fires, frosts, accidents, diseases, droughts, storms, and the like; from other species, who were competitors or enemies; and from unbrotherly members of the same species. Some have survived, but the great majority have perished. Only a fraction, and generally an appallingly small fraction, of each generation of a species have lived to maturity."

"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."

"Death introduc'd through fierce antipathie: Beast now with Beast gan war, & Fowle with Fowle, And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving, Devourd each other"

"If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose; their strongest instincts impel them to it, and many of them seem to have been constructed incapable of supporting themselves by any other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature, had been employed in collecting evidence: to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves! If were not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not suppose it to have been made by a Being of infinite power. But if imitation of the Creator's will as revealed in nature, were applied as a rule of action in this case, the most atrocious enormities of the worst men would be more than justified by the apparent intention of Providence that throughout all animated nature the strong should prey upon the weak."

"The suggestion that we should take wild animal suffering seriously as an ethical issue runs contrary to many of our most powerful biases. It concerns animals for which we, instinctively, feel very little sympathy, and whose suffering we humans did not cause and thus do not feel obliged to help alleviate. The suffering is also far removed from our daily lives and it exists on a scale of magnitude so large that it is hard for us to grasp it. Finally, wild animal suffering challenges a romantic view of nature, which is deeply held by many, and since all large-scale solutions lie far in the future, it is easy for us simply to disregard it."

"[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."

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began."

"In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. ... The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them."

"One way to increase the chances that the suffering of wild animals will be taken into account in research and development is to challenge the biases and assumptions that make it so difficult for us to address it. Most important, perhaps, is the pre-Darwinian fiction that life in nature is harmonious, and that without human intervention, all is fine and good. The truth is quite the opposite. If we imagined that from now on, animals started emitting a red light every time they suffered, then from space, Earth would no longer be a blue planet, but a red and glowing one."

"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."

"[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."

"It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation. The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species."