I find the final question about human intervention fascinating.
The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch,” Langley adds. “But the life of a seal—and indeed any wild animal—is tough.”
This idea that human influence over nature should not reach beyond species boundaries, that there is no universal value common to several species, seems prevalent in natural sciences. Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
I think the main point is that nature is in a dynamic equilibrium that's built up over eons. We disrupt that equilibrium unintentionally by things like development, but well intended disruptions can have just as negative effects. The typical example would be something like removing a predator (or even a disease) from an area which results in a population explosion of its former prey which results in increased pressures on what that prey eat and so on all the way down the food chain.
And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict.
This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two.
By that logic, then we "disrupting" that equilibrium is also part of the equilibrium. Is it consistent to let a few adult male seals murder hundreds of pups while at the same time forbid hunters to hunt a few seals for fur, or fishermen in Faroe islands to catch dolphins once a year?
To me, it sounds that the fear of unintended consequences that you mentioned is what I called "distrust of human society". Yes, I am aware of the risk, and that's an argument that I accept in general. But it applies only at large scale, so not in the case at hand. Or we can picture an even smaller scale: picture a single old male attacking a single defenseless pup. Interfering?
The scale of animal tourism + photography is rather large, and every single time somebody sees something awful happening, we have an instinct to want to 'fix' it. Yet it's nature - stomach turning things are happening constantly. I don't know what you mean by a distrust of human society, but if you mean that I think it would rapidly grow beyond a handful of isolated incidents, then that's certainly true.
I want the bill for damages caused with reintroduction- to be sent to the local GREEN party and its voters, thank you very much. Reintroduction of the beaver in europe has caused millions in damages
The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem.
The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them).
Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
Simple and clear yet everything that follow is controversial. :)
First, humans are animals. You mean "each species value itself more than others"? I don't know, but I certainly do not value any human life above any other species life; Humans are amazing, but when they are malfunctioning they can do a lot of damage ;)
Of course I was not thinking about preventing predation, or life would be limited to some bacterias, plants and algaes that can power their metabolism from some minerals and/or sunlight.
Some violence in nature is gratuitous (like a cat killing a mouse for fun) and this looks like an example of that. If we let this happen, why stop human hunters from killing seals too?
We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.
One can probably can have a better communication with, say a dog, than a sever autist or someone in the state of deep coma.
We don’t apply our ethics based on the communication (or same-language ability) but instead on an arbitrary selection. That selection evolved recently to includes a wider set of humans (anti-racism and feminism). Antispecism is an interesting view as it state a the specie itself (humans /dogs/caw/cat/chicken…) isn’t a valid denominator to define what is ethic what isn’t.
We definitely apply our ethics and premise it based upon communication.
Given a stranger, all I can do is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and make assumptions about how they want to be treated. This will be generally more successful given my broader exposure to the world or if they are from the same culture as me but individual differences can be stark. After some interactions where they can make their preferences known to me I can then follow the better precept of, "Treat others how they want to be treated," assuming the actions required of me are not especially burdensome and I can find compromises with them otherwise.
I have an easier time imagining a severe autist in a consensual BDSM relationship than that I could believe that someone knows that their dog actually likes being slapped. I have an easier time believing this because an autist in abstract may have some communication problems but it is not impossible for them to make their preferences known. These are both so hypothetical though, real situations would require much context of which communication forms a basis (I am not saying we don't understand dogs at all, just that the gap is large).
There is no real anti-specism. What there is the proposition that a central nervous system is a prerequisite for consciousness and from that stems moral value (few people argue that we shouldn't enslave and consume members of the Brassica species). But even then, few of the staunchest vegans are against pesticides or anti-parasitic medication, how many animals (insects) must die to bring one carrot to my table? I don't know the answer but it will always be more than 0. Meanwhile, it is instead possible to believe that the guinea worm has as much inherent moral value as a human but that it is ethical for humans to try to eradicate the guinea worm completely.
Regarding antispeciesism you're conflating two different concepts (although you may have you own opinion):
1. antispeciesism = rejecting discrimination based solely on species membership.
2. all living beings having exactly the same moral value.
Most anti-speciesists defend (1), not (2). Anti-speciesism also doesn’t imply that killing animals is always wrong, most people instead reason in terms of reducing suffering/benefiting interests, and proportionality. You can believe a guinea worm has moral worth and still think eradicating it is justified because of the suffering it causes.
And the “insects die for carrots” point is not really a problem specific to veganism, since animal agriculture typically requires even more crops, land use, and indirect animal deaths. Also there's vegans that are speciesists and anti-speciesists that aren't vegan. Those concepts intersects but are not strictly equal.
I'm not sure to understand your other points but strongly agree communication helps to grow ethics and gain empathy. However it's not absolutely required as seen with the exemples of comas, mute, newborn, or as you mentioned someone of a different culture or language. I hardly understand how is it "impossible for [the dogs] to make their preferences known" especially in the situation of being slapped. Perhaps I missed you point because that contradict all my interaction with dogs and gods's owners.
Have you met someone who claimed that their dog liked being slapped? When I imagine such a situation I imagine a person who is just excusing abuse because of the priors in my life, I have an easy time imagining this since I have encountered more than one such person. Impossible is probably too strong of a word, but I mean that you must interpret their behavior and interpretation is to me more a form of estimation not knowing, these examples are intended to show that non-verbal communication is still deficient when compared to a person with problems with verbal communications. Whether it is ok (ethical) to slap another individual that hasn't done anything to you is dependent on knowing their preferences and that takes communication and hence we apply our ethics based on communications.
"Insects die for carrots," is a problem for vegans who base their preference on the idea that killing any animal is wrong for sustenance. A person willing to kill a cow because they like the way the flesh tastes or finds it more nourishing simply isn't going to see a problem with an insect dying for a carrot. One person is holding themself to a higher standard and therefore is vulnerable to this critique. Animals need to die so that we may live, people quibble about where the line should be drawn but the line exists for almost everyone (excluding the Jain vegetarians, but practically speaking it exists for everyone).
I am not so much conflating those two as arguing that a) anti-specism much like freedom of speech has all kinds of caveats built in and isn't absolute even in the few people that would preach it, b) anti-specism doesn't form a basis for ethics because there are more absolute truths that override it but also render it unnecessary.
Fair enough. I see your point on the limits of interpretation and how any philosophie ends up being somewhat arbitrary.
You still choose a frame (eg: "killing any animal is wrong"), then show that frame is irrational and deduct that the while group is wrong. Classical strawmaning, although I'm sure that's not your intent. "Animals needing to die" as a practical truth is not a problem for vegans, you're arguing alone here. However many people thinks suffering is not desirable and act accordingly to minimise it. You're free to critic though.
I understand better your second explication: there's not more absolute anti-specism than absolute freedom of speech. I find more interesting the "All models are wrong, but some are useful" perspective as it helps interacting with the world, but in a theorical land you're probably right.
It's also a inability to accept the cthullian horror built into nature.
Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
Which though, are not a sign of harmony- its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers, the losers becoming cattle, organs or worse and usually they do not defect only because then some horror from the abyss eats the whole gametheory board and their abilities have atrophied -aka cooperation usually is a sort of slavery.
> its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers
No need to appeal to emotions this way. At the individual level there are only losers, and we all die. At the universe level, whatever happens, happens, and it’s up to us to find beauty in it.
Well, yeah. Murder requires intent and, at least in human populations where cannibalism is not a problem, the separation with predation is clear. It’s less clear in this cases where the killing also involves eating (parts of) the victim. We don’t understand why they do it, therefore we cannot really condemn this as murder, therefore whether we should intervene and what we should do are not obvious.
So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment. We kill millions of animals, many just for literal sport, but to save an animal from another is 'too much intervention'
And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems.
If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
There's a species where each individual literally eats a billion animals over its lifetime. If saving animals from an early death is important, then we should do everything we can to make blue whales go extinct.
> So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment.
It’s less strange if you realise that different people have different opinions and react differently. The biologists saying that we should not intervene because we don’t understand are unlikely to be the ones hunting lions for fun. On the other end, some specimens of human beings would have absolutely zero qualms about killing every single seal on the planet.
Before invoking any moral or philosophical principals, I'd consider the PoV of wildlife & natural area professionals. They know the public can react strongly to situations proximate to charismatic fauna, or "morality play" scenarios. But the public's actual appreciation of animal behavior, ecology, and natural area issues is little beyond "parks are pretty" and cartoons about anthropomorphized animals.
Meanwhile - gov't funding and support for real-world animal, ecological, and natural area work is paltry, with many critical problems neglected.
And trying to somehow force lions to be monogamous, and hawks to be vegetarians, and cuckoos not to abandon their young, and etc. is the sort of idealistic black hole that all their funding and support could easily be poured down - with less-than-nothing to show for it.
We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
> Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
I don’t think it’s either. It comes from the realisation that if we intervene we are most likely to fuck things up in difficult to foresee ways. It’s humility and understanding that even though we are powerful, our understanding of things is actually quite limited.
I know a couple of biologists, and none would say anything like what you mentioned. They don’t tend to anthropomorphise nature.
I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
Thank you for sharing your story. I also experienced something similar having to kill mice we caught on glue trips before I knew of how painful they can be for the mice. I heard being scared about yourself and realizing the potential you have for darkness within you, is a natural step in healthy human development. (Not that everyone has to kill or actually do something dark or unethical to realize that, there are certainly other ways).
Then when I dug into some rabbit holes to better understand the potential for humans to execute on this darkness or sinful behavior both historically and currently, it opened me up to a sudden realization where I could no longer see or experience the darkness in the world with the gullibility and naiveness I had as a child - this means surely someone died in an area like the public mall where I am at, or in this alley over the centuries, or even this may happen later today and I was just there - it could even involve my own death if I should be unlucky. (or self defense, and someone else's).
Do you ever wish you could go back to a state of ignorance about "sacrifices" and death in the sense of what those experiences opened up for you?
Yes, the term is “sacrificed” is unfortunately used today in many research labs in the US.
My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department.
“We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.”
“Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0].
And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary.
I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work.
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates.
Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.
EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says
> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.
As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak
Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.
