Animal suffering

[Undertoad]

When we look at the lives of animals in the wild, there is a huge amount of suffering going on.

If you're an animal in the wild, most likely you'll be eaten alive by a predator, in your infancy or childhood. If, by some miracle, you reach adulthood, your life will still be very short; and it'll be full of pain, hunger, and confusion. The smallest injury will take you down; any disease or sickness is likely fatal. There's also a very good chance you'll have parasites, who will also eat you from inside, until you painfully die.

When we talk about animal rights, our first concern is for animal cruelty, not animal suffering. We're thinking about the types of animal suffering specifically inflicted by humans. But that's an incredibly tiny fraction of all the suffering that happens. We have spent no time discussing that; we're not really interested in it.

We're not interested in it because we have the simple explanation: it's natural, and we have the value that natural=correct in some sense. We value the chaos, even though we try very hard to minimize the chaos for ourselves.

But at the same time, we tend to try to save any hurt wild animal we find. In the Philadelphia area, we have a wildlife center that nurses the squrls and birbs that people come across who are injured and "need rescuing".

Consider this weird proposition: the only way to reduce net animal suffering around the world is to reduce their habitats. It's kinda both true and rather unthinkable! Or this: we care very much about animal extinction, but not that all the individual beasts of that species are suffering. We are in favor of keeping a species alive at its own peril, something like that.

The subject is full of interesting contradictions.