Catia Faria

In this paper, following the taxonomy developed by Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds of different sources and states of vulnerability, I claim that wild animals are inherently and situationally vulnerable. This is because they can experience suffering as a response to certain internal and external states and have a high exposure to, and a low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. From this it follows that we have a moral obligation to support and assist individuals who are occurrently vulnerable and to reduce the risk of dispositional vulnerabilities becoming occurrent in the future, by endorsing some form of what I call ‘environmental enhancement’. Finally, I pay critical attention to how to prevent interventions aimed at ameliorating vulnerability from paradoxically generating pathogenic vulnerabilities.

Animals, like humans, suffer and die from natural causes. This is particularly true of animals living in the wild, given their high exposure to, and low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. Most wild animals likely have short lives, full of suffering, usually ending in terrible deaths. This book argues that on the assumption that we have reasons to assist others in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or reduce the harms wild animals suffer, provided that it is feasible and that the expected result is positive overall. It is of the utmost importance that academics from different disciplines as well as animal advocates begin to confront this issue. The more people are concerned with wild animal suffering, the more probable it is that safe and effective solutions to the plight of wild animals will be implemented in the future.

The Weatherall Report claims that research on non-human primates is permitted and morally required. The argument rests on the following thought experiment: > The hospital fire : A hospital is on fire. Some of the residents are humans and others are non-human animals. You can only save one group. What do you do? Some people have the intuition that we should rescue the humans. According to the report, if we accept that human lives have priority over non-human lives in this case, consistency requires us to support the use of non-human animals in research. This is because both cases are about saving human lives at the expense of the lives of non-human animals. Two critical replies appeared in the literature, by E J Moore1 and Muireann Quigley.2 In a recent paper3 Gardar Arnason claims that such objections fail. I will argue, however, that his assessment is unconvincing. The first objection pressed by Moore is that there are fundamental disanalogies between The hospital fire and biomedical research. In that scenario we face a life-or-death emergency situation whereas in biomedical research we do not. In such situations it may be justified to prioritise those closest to us (eg, species …