The best columns are a kind of conversation, between author and readers and responders, and most importantly, between the ideas that sprout up in a dialogue. So I paused a good long time before starting this essay, asking myself how to best start a conversation about ethics, and how it informs our outlook on people, animals and nature.
‘Ethics you say! Heaven help us’. Oh, it’s not so bad. Ethics is not about rigid rules or finger-wagging diatribes. It is really about the moral values that inform (or should inform) ‘how we ought to live’. So allow me to start with a subject that is surprisingly concrete — the ethics of wolf recovery.
Wolves speak to me like few other species. Wolves are indispensable ‘top carnivores’ that promote the health of ecosystems, as well as a ‘flagship species’ whose cache helps protect or restore other animals and plants that are not so charismatic. These are the usual reasons we hear for wolf recovery from advocates, educators and scientists. I don’t disagree, but taken alone these reasons seem rather bloodless. Wolves are more than a resource to nature and society. Rather, they are part of a rich tapestry of natural life and human culture, one we are only beginning to understand and value.
I seek a richer appreciation of wolves in part because of my life’s experience. I have keen childhood memories of wolves passing by our cabin in northern Ontario. They were welcomed visitors, who shared the landscape with us. My sister and I were taught to respect their beauty, their role in nature and their wild ferocity. So as a young man, I was astonished by the willful ignorance, vehement hatred and casual brutality towards wolves in Europe and North America. Wolves preyed on my intellectual curiosity as well, and in graduate school I became fascinated with their links to culture, science and policy. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that learning to live with wolves is a precondition (and example) for healing our troubled relationship with the planet.
Wolf recovery — their conservation, protection and restoration — is a controversial subject. To date, the controversy has been addressed through a policy process that sees wolves as a ‘natural resource’ available for ’sustained harvest’ and requiring ‘rational’ wildlife management as driven by ’science’. This is coded language. It implies that wolves are no different than any other agricultural commodity, or that they are simply functional units of ecosystems. To think otherwise is to be muddled, emotional and irrational. This set of coded ideas is nonsense. I’m all for clear-headed management and planning, but at root, our troubled relationship with wolves is not and never has been about science. No, the trouble with wolves is a moral conflict over whose well-being ‘counts’ in our personal and political deliberations, and to resolve this trouble, we need ethics.
Human beings have always existed in a mixed community of people and animals, both wild and domestic. Because our actions have consequences for the well-being of others, we have responsibilities to those in our care or affected by us. This is the essence of what it means to consider the ethical issue of ‘how we ought to live’. These responsibilities apply to both people and other animals. Moreover, wolves are not biological machines to do with as we will. They are feeling, thinking and social creatures, having an intrinsic moral value of their own. We use the same reasoning to recognize the moral value of people, and there is every ethological and ethical reason to do so for wolves. The notion that wolves are morally excluded from this consideration simply because they are not people is a prejudice aptly termed speciesism.
Because wolves are part of a more-than-human moral community, I support their recovery across the landscape. They should not be isolated in a gulag of isolated habitats, surround by exclusion and free-fire zones, and subject to routine and invasive management. They should be free to make their way and their living where appropriate. Obviously wolves don’t belong in downtown London or your chicken coop, but we know that wolves don’t require wilderness, and there are plenty of other spaces where they can survive apart from or along-side human settlements.
Still, the full recovery of wolves will entail adaptations in our way of life. For instance, wolves are attracted to easy meals, and this can lead to conflicts with domestic animals. Learning to live with wolves can be as simple as securing our garbage, not leaving food on the deck, bringing companion animals indoors at night, and using guard dogs to protect sheep and cattle in fenced or open fields. These are best practices we should employ anyway, and the effort involved is minor.
Wolves are not the only way to explore questions about humanity’s relationship to animals and nature. They have, nonetheless, a special resonance in many human cultures — as beasts of waste and desolation, as vital ecological agents, as creatures exemplifying the best of humanity, as wild beings we can respect in all their familiarity and strangeness. Wolves move people, pro and con, and this opens up possibilities for dialogue about human-animal relations. Wolves keep our feet on the ground, helping us to remember that the point of ethical dialogue is the well-being of people, animals and nature.
Finally, wolves are a cogent indicator of our own moral health. If we can learn to live with wolves, we will per force have taken significant steps towards living sustainably and healing our relationship with nature. This is a moral task worth embracing! If however we cannot learn to live with wolves, we will have failed to address one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. The choice, as with every ethical issue, is ours to make, individually and collectively. Let us hope we make the right one.
Cheers, Bill
Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).
Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.
William Lynn :: Jun.21.2005 ::
Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wolves ::
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Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity (wwww.biologicaldiversity.org) sends us this very disturbing news….
