Clare Alexandra Palmer

This paper explores ethical issues raised by the application of non-surgical, pharmaceutical fertility control to manage reproductive behaviors in domesticated and wild animal species. We focus on methods that interfere with the effects of GnRH, making animals infertile and significantly suppressing sexual behavior in both sexes. The paper is anchored by considering ethical issues raised by four diverse cases: the use of pharmaceutical fertility control in male slaughter pigs, domesticated stallions and mares, male companion dogs and female white-tailed deer. Ethical concerns explored include animals’ welfare, the possible violation of animals’ rights, including rights to life, reproduction and bodily integrity; and potential concerns about loss of wildness. We compare ethical concerns about pharmaceutical fertility control with alternative strategies for managing animals’ reproductive behavior including spaying and neutering, sex separation, sex sorting, culling, and doing nothing. The paper concludes that there are some cases where pharmaceutical fertility control is the best ethical choice in current circumstances; but that there are other cases where alternative choices, including doing nothing, would be ethically preferable. This suggests that in ethical terms a case-by-case approach should be taken to the use of pharmaceutical fertility control in animals.

In his paper The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem (Nanoethics 2:305–316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of disenhancing animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it’s difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there’s a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests

It’s widely agreed that animal pain matters morally – that we shouldn’t, for instance, starve our animal companions, and that we should provide medical care to sick or injured agricultural animals, and not only because it benefits us to do so. But do we have the same moral responsibilities towards wild animals? Should we feed them if they are starving, and intervene to prevent them from undergoing other forms of suffering, for instance from predation? Using an example that includes both wild and domesticated animals, I outline two contrasting ways of thinking about our moral responsibilities with respect to assisting animals that are apparently in need. One approach is based entirely around animals’ capacities; the other takes context and historical relations into account as well. While not attempting to adjudicate between these views, I’ll point out the advantages and difficulties of both

This article considers whether a morally relevant distinction can be drawn between wild and domesticated animals. The term “wildness” can be used in several different ways, only one of which (constitutive wildness, meaning an animal that has not been domesticated by being bred in particular ways) is generally paired and contrasted with“domesticated.” Domesticated animals are normally deliberately bred and confined. One of the article's arguments concerns human initiatives that establish relations with animals and thereby change what is owed to these animals. The main relations of interest in ethics are the vulnerability and dependence in animals that are created when humans establish certain relations with them on farms, in zoos, in laboratories, and the like. Domestication is a pervasive way in which humans make animals vulnerable, and thereby duties of animal care and protection arise in a persistent way.

Influential parts of the veterinary profession, and notably the American Veterinary Medicine Association, are promoting the routine neutering of cats and dogs that will not be used for breeding purposes. However, this view is not universally held, even among representatives of the veterinary profession. In particular, some veterinary associations in Europe defend the view that when reproduction is not an issue, then neutering, particularly of dogs, should be decided on a case-by-case basis. However, even in Europe the American view is gaining ground. In light of this situation, this paper considers whether or not routine neutering of cats and dogs, in cases where uncontrolled reproduction is not an issue, can be ethically defended. The starting point of this consideration is a review of the veterinary literature on the effects of neutering on companion animals. The focus is both on the welfare of neutered animals themselves, and on behavioral and other effects that may not directly affect the animals’ welfare, but that maybe motivating factors for owners to neuter their companion animals. Here it becomes clear that justification for routine neutering, particularly of confined male dogs, does not follow from claims about the dogs’ own welfare. The costs of neutering male dogs, in terms of the increased risk of very serious diseases, may well outweigh the benefits. Then, building on this veterinary material, but including some other, additional considerations, the paper goes through some possible ethical approaches to routine animal neutering. These ethical approaches offer different degrees of concern about, or opposition to, routine neutering. Finally, based on this ethical exploration, it is argued that routine neutering, at least in the case of non- free-ranging companion animals, raises significant ethical questions, and from some ethical perspectives, looks highly problematic.

This paper provides an overview of some key, and contrasting, ideas in environmental ethics for those unfamiliar with the field. It outlines the ways in which environmental ethicists have defended different positions concerning what matters ethically, from those that focus on human beings (including issues of environmental justice and justice between generations) to those who argue that non-human animals, living organisms, ecosystems and species have some kind of moral status. The paper also considers different theoretical approaches to environmental ethics in terms of consequentialist, broadly deontological and virtue theories. Finally, three different interpretations of moral pluralism in environmental ethics are introduced: pluralism about values, pluralism about theories, and a pragmatic, methodological pluralism.

Robin Attfield's work has been central to the development of environmental philosophy in a number of key areas, including stewardship, population, human development and the moral standing of living organisms. In this paper, I'll focus primarily on just one aspect of Attfield's work: human moral obligations to sentient animals. I'll first outline how, and in what ways, Attfield has argued that such animals are morally important. I'll then suggest that while providing a good grounding for some central concerns of animal ethics, Attfield's focus on animals' capacities, in the context of a consequentialist approach to ethics, doesn't obviously accommodate other relational concerns that we might think are important. I'll consider how a consequentialist such as Attfield might respond to this concern, and I'll conclude by explaining why this still leaves some residual worries about what I'll call "capacity-oriented" consequentialist approaches to animal ethics.

Do animals have moral rights? If so, which ones? How does this affect our thinking about agriculture and experimentation? If animals have moral rights, should they be protected by law? These are some of the questions addressed in this collection, which contains more than 30 papers spanning nearly 40 years of debates about animal rights. It includes work by leading advocates of animal rights both in philosophy and law, as well as contributions by those resolutely opposed to the very idea of animal rights. A substantial Introduction surveys key arguments in the area and puts the papers in context.

It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human cases-we think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet ‘welfare-only’ positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the ‘Blind Hens’ Challenge’. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and theoretical reasons why even those adopting ‘welfare-only’ views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit

This chapter explores the key values at stake in feral cat management, focusing on the debate over whether to use trap-neuter-return or trap-euthanize as management tools for cat populations. The chapter provides empirical background on unowned cats, sketches widely used arguments in favour of reducing cat populations and considers how these arguments relate to important and widely held values including the value of lives, subjective experiences and species. The chapter promotes critical understanding of the diverse value positions that may be at play in debates about the treatment of ownerless cats.

Some species face extinction if they are unable to keep pace with climate change. Yet proposals to assist threatened species’ poleward or uphill migration (‘assisted migration’) have caused significant controversy among conservationists, not least because assisted migration seems to threaten some values, even as it protects others. To date, however, analysis of ethical and value questions about assisted migration has largely remained abstract, removed from the ultimately pragmatic decision about whether or not to move a particular species. This paper uses the case study of the whitebark pine, a keystone species of sub-alpine habitats in western North America, to consider how particular cases of assisted migration may be ethically approached. After taking into account the value of species, wildness, place, ecosystems, culture and sentient animals, we conclude that, on balance, there appear to be good reasons to move the whitebark pine

This paper explores the idea of 'respect for nature' in the Earth Charter. It maintains that the Earth Charter proposes a broadly holistic environmental ethic where, in situations of conflict, species are given ethical priority over the lives of individual sentient organisms. The paper considers policy implications of this perspective, looking by means of example at the current European environmental policy dispute about the ruddy and white-headed duck. Questions about the value of species and biological diversity this raises are explored. The paper concludes that the principle of valuing individual animal lives should be given more prominence in Earth Charter principles.

It is frequently claimed that breeding animals that we know will have unavoidable health problems is at least prima facie wrong, because it harms the animals concerned. However, if we take ‘harm’ to mean ‘makes worse off’, this claim appears false. Breeding an animal that will have unavoidable health problems does not make any particular individual animal worse off, since an animal bred without such problems would be a different individual animal. Yet, the intuition that there is something ethically wrong about breeding animals—such as purebred pedigree dogs—in ways that seem negatively to affect welfare remains powerful. In this paper, an animal version of what is sometimes called the non-identity problem is explored, along with a number of possible ways of understanding what might be wrong with such breeding practices, if it is not that they harm the animal itself. These possibilities include harms to others, placeholder arguments, non-comparative ideas of harm, an ‘impersonal’ approach, and concerns about human attitudes and dispositions