1
Introduction

1.1 Introduction

The Amazon rainforests of South America are famously home to some of the most beautiful parrots in the world. Not surprisingly, there's demand, both locally and globally, to keep these birds as pets. This has led to a market in which parrots are trapped and traded even as, in many cases, wild populations decline. In Peru, for instance, although the parrot trade was banned in 1973, even in the year 2000 roughly 80?000-90?000 parrots were illegally captured annually (Gastañaga et al. 2011). Declining populations lead to rising prices, creating a positive feedback loop where parrot trapping is further incentivized. Indeed, researchers have found a significant positive correlation between the most profitable species in the wildlife markets of Amazonian Peru and those that are becoming increasingly rare (D'Cruze et al. 2021). Similar practices occur in other parts of South America (Figure 1.1).

Given the serious impact that the pet trade has had on parrot populations, there's been much discussion about how to discourage such practices (Ribeiro et al. 2019). Such discussion raises complex ethical questions. At the most fundamental level, the question is why, exactly, such practices should be discouraged. Aren't parrots just another resource, like oil or timber? Why shouldn't humans capture and sell them? Granted, some populations and whole species of parrot are becoming scarce. But why does it matter whether parrot species decline or disappear? What's so concerning about the loss of species?

Figure 1.1 A cage full of wild parrots destined for the pet trade, seized by the Police in Brazil.

Source: Joa Souza/dreamstime LLC/, reproduced with permission.

It's also worth asking whether it's fair to deny the many Indigenous parrot trappers of their income. After all, the Indigenous people who trap the parrots aren't responsible for the extensive habitat loss that's primarily causing the decline in parrot populations. Why should they bear the burden of actions from which other, often richer, people benefit?

Taking a different perspective, while trapping parrots may have consequences for populations, species, and the ecosystems of which they form a part, it also affects the welfare of individual parrots. There's considerable evidence that being captured and smuggled over long distances is highly stressful for wild parrots, and, despite the efforts of their handlers, birds regularly die in the process (Baker et al. 2013). Being kept in captivity also has welfare consequences; despite being highly social animals, parrots are often kept in small cages and confined alone. But then, how important is the welfare of wild animals? How far - if at all - should welfare be factored into decisions about how to manage populations of animals such as parrots, both in the wild and in captivity?

This book, Wildlife Ethics: The Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation, has been written to assist in thinking through questions like these. To explain what this book is about, it's helpful to look more closely at what the terms in our title mean. We'll start with "wildlife", for there's certainly no universally agreed definition of what's meant by the term. Most generally, "wildlife" is usually taken to refer to wild animals rather than to wild plants, fungi, bacteria, and so on (though these are obviously forms of wild life). Until the 1970s, wildlife was generally used as a synonym for "game" - animals hunted by people - but this use is in decline. Now, the term "wildlife" is most commonly applied to undomesticated animals living free in a natural environment. However, there are obvious exceptions and boundary cases (and different interpretations of both "natural" and "domestication," which we'll discuss later in the book).

In this book, then, wildlife refers to free-living animals in natural environments, as well as in urban, suburban, and rural areas. We'll also include zoo animals since they are kept as representatives (and sometimes as potential saviors) of their free-living relatives and are generally bred to retain "wild" traits. We'll also include animals that belong to species generally thought of as wildlife but that live at the borderline of being farmed. Some game management practices, for instance, come close to animal husbandry in that the animals are given supplemental feed (e.g., feeding corn to white-tailed deer in North America). Some "wild" animals are even farm reared (e.g., civets and bear species kept in captivity for bile production in East Asia and gamebirds bred to be released for hunting in Europe). There are also "feral" animals, such as cats, pigs, and dogs/dingoes in Australia, which were once farmed or kept as companions but now live outside human support. And sometimes domesticated or "de-domesticated" animals are released to perform ecological functions as part of rewilding projects, such as cattle and horses in northern Europe.

All these borderline cases suggest that there's a wide gray area where animals are more or less wild, including feral, captive-bred, and heavily managed populations. These questions aren't simply terminological; they may well have legal and ethical implications. For instance, it's often thought that human responsibilities toward animals (such as whether sick animals should be treated) are partially determined by the kinds of relationships that humans have with them (Gamborg et al. 2016). However, for the purposes of this book, we'll adopt a broad understanding of wildlife that includes all these animals and untangle the details as we go through them.

In another sense, though, our use of the term "wildlife" in this book is less broad than it could be; we use the term to refer to sentient vertebrates (which is also the most common interpretation) for reasons we'll say more about below. By sentient, we mean animals with subjective experiences and inner lives: they can, for instance, consciously experience pleasure and pain, fear, hunger, and excitement. (Note that "consciously" here doesn't mean "reflectively." We assume that animals can have conscious experiences without the more sophisticated metacognitive abilities that humans possess.) This means that as we use the term, wildlife includes at least mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. While we recognize that some invertebrate animals are now widely agreed to be sentient - especially the cephalopod mollusks (such as octopods, cuttlefish, and squid) and decapod crustaceans (crabs, crayfish, etc.) - we won't focus on them in this book. The sentience of other invertebrates - such as insects - is not currently widely accepted, although there's uncertainty here (Lacalli 2022).

One reason for limiting the discussion to sentient animals is that they have a welfare, and animal welfare has become an important and complicating ethical consideration in recent discussions of wildlife ethics (Baker et al. 2013). We think that the focus on wild animals as individuals with their own welfare is an important new emphasis that this book brings to debates about wildlife management and conservation. Given the interest that both the public and many decision makers have in animals as individuals, it's increasingly difficult to settle controversies about wildlife by insisting only on the value of species, biodiversity, or ecosystems.

Two other things should be noted: by using the term "animals," we're not intending to imply that humans are not animals. They obviously are. However, it would have been clunky to refer to "other animals" or "nonhuman animals" throughout the book. For similar reasons, we have reduced the use of Latin species names to a minimum for ease of reading, including them only where there may be ambiguity about the wildlife species to which we are referring.

So much for wildlife; what about ethics? Most generally, ethics deals with questions about what one should or ought to do, ideas about what's right and wrong or good and bad, using terms such as values, duties, rights, responsibilities, and virtues. While the law often incorporates ethical standards, being ethical isn't the same as following the law; after all, many actions are ethically questionable but still legal. For example, using explosives to catch fish (blast fishing) was legal in Indonesia until 1985 (Fox et al. 2005). Moreover, being ethical isn't just about following one's feelings or intuitions, though both can indeed play important roles. In this book, we take ethics in a wide and inclusive way to involve reasoning about values and the rationales for holding those values, about the possible consequences that might follow from actions, about the interests and rights that might be at stake in a given situation, about individual virtue and character, and about people's aspirations for their societies.

We further take it that decision making about issues such as wildlife management and conservation should depend on being able to give justifying reasons that other people can understand and make sense of, even if they disagree, for reasons that they too can explain. Essentially, we...