“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.” — Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden
Trophy-hunting is a recurring theme in the pixels of SA online media. From Don Pinnock dismissing the trophy-hunting as a “nasty colonial sport” to Ivo Vegter ridiculing those who decry it as “smug left-liberal elites”, the debate on trophy-hunting is as pertinent — and passionate — as ever.
Browse social media the next time a photo of a hunter posing with his — or her — victim goes viral, and you’ll be exposed to some of the most hostile rhetoric on the internet. Have you ever gone down a rabbit hole of hate? I don’t recommend it.
The ire of social media mobs should not, of course, be equated with moral consensus. Still, the level of vitriol produced by these instances suggests that more and more people view the act of killing for sport as something worthy of our condemnation. Why, then, is it still practised? And why are Vegter and others so eager to defend it?
Defenders of trophy-hunting often point to its economic and conservation significance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Allowing private farmers or local communities to control wild areas and profit from their natural resources — including wild animals — creates an incentive for the expansion and conservation of rare and endangered species. In short, trophy-hunting, so the argument goes, creates conditions that allow a species to grow.
This view is not without its critics. Many articles — including by Ian Michler and Pinnock — have been dedicated to refuting the hunting-for-conservation hypothesis, arguing that the industry is poorly regulated, lacks transparency and is riddled with corruption. Hunting quotas are also often based on guesswork, leading to over-shooting.
The debate on trophy-hunting, then, is often framed between those who argue that trophy-hunting aids wildlife populations and those who say that trophy-hunting impedes it. The dispute, therefore, can be said to be an empirical one. Who is right?
I don’t intend to answer this question. Instead, I want to challenge the premise both sides agree on: an abundance of wildlife is good.
Most people have an idyllic view of nature. They believe wild animals live pleasant lives and that we must do what we can to conserve — and expand — this state of affairs. When conservationists or journalists report on an increase in wildlife, they often describe the species as “thriving” or “flourishing”.
But is an expanding population a sign of success? Consider the species Gallus gallus domesticus, more popularly known as “chicken”. There are about 19-billion chickens alive, the vast majority raised on factory farms, meaning most suffer from restricted movement, undergo mutilation without pain relief and many die from dehydration. I'll spare you my sermon on the evils of factory farming, but the lesson of this slight digression is this: population size is the wrong criterion for measuring the success of a species.
While conservationists and environmentalists are, of course, quick to acknowledge the problems of overpopulation (that is habitat degradation, human-wildlife conflict, reduction in other species), they still consider an expansion of wildlife, in the absence of such externalities, a good thing.
But let us take a moment to consider the lives of animals in the wild. Pristine landscapes may be aesthetically pleasing to the human eye and “the bush” can provide city dwellers with a welcome escape from the urban jungle, but for its inhabitants — wild animals — nature is a hostile place.
As David Attenborough likes to tell those complaining about too much violence in his nature documentaries, “they should see what we leave on the cutting-room floor”. In addition to the suffering inflicted upon prey by their predators, many wild animals are also victims of starvation, parasitism, infectious diseases and extreme weather. Then there is also the widespread phenomenon of infanticide. While the reasons for such behaviour may vary, the outcome is constant: premature death for the infant.
Some animals kill young members of their own species as a source of food — or because they are competitors for it. Mothers sometimes kill their young because they are handicapped and would require too much maternal investment, and males often kill offspring unlikely to be their direct descendants. It must be stressed that these are not rare events or restricted to a particular species. Infanticide has been observed in wild dogs, lions, hyenas, wolves, geese, coyotes, most primates and even squirrels. Infanticide does also not always entail cannibalism. Among primates, for example, a phenomenon known as “aunting to death” involves non-lactating females kidnapping another’s offspring to let them starve to death.
There are also studies that show wild animals experiencing higher levels of stress than those raised in captivity, excluding factory-farmed animals. Stress levels may not be a perfect measurement of wellbeing, but the claim that excessive stress is detrimental to living a happy life should not be controversial.
Most of us, of course, recognise the savagery of nature. Who among us would want to return to the time of our ancestors 20,000 years ago when man still roamed the wilderness without access to adequate shelter, medicine and modern institutions? Some may claim that evolution has equipped animals to thrive in the wild, but natural selection is concerned with genetic prolificness, not the wellbeing of its descendants.
Consider that most wild animal species follow a reproductive strategy known as the r-strategy. Instead of investing in the survival of just a few offspring, r-strategists pass their genes to future generations by flooding the habitat with progeny so that, regardless of mortality, at least some of them will survive to reproduce. While such a strategy may be evolutionarily stable, it produces dead infants with gruesome regularity. At this point, some may even argue that, if life in the wild is as bad as I claim, premature death may be desirable in these cases. But the point to note here is that the process of dying is rarely a pleasant experience. Predation, starvation and death by parasitism or illness are sources of extreme suffering. When viewing high mortality rates among infant animals, then, we should not be aghast that so many of them die, we should lament that they go through the experience of dying painful deaths.
An r-strategy stands in contrast to a k-selection strategy, which entails parents investing heavily in a few offspring, as is the case with humans. While there are wild animals whose reproductive methods more closely resemble that of a k-selection strategy, and therefore have a higher chance of surviving infancy, we should not conclude that their lives are overwhelmingly pleasant. For example, even among cheetahs, who have about three cubs per litter, 5%-30% of cubs reach adulthood.
What, then, should our attitude be towards wildlife?
To be sure, conservation of Africa’s wild animals remains laudable. But at what cost? A species cannot suffer, those who compose it can. It is misguided, therefore, to blindly celebrate a growing animal population without taking the quality of those lives into account. This counts for trophy-hunting advocates who want to hold a species’ survival hostage to their bloody desires as well as starry-eyed environmentalists who believe that wild animals live good lives because they are free.
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What we need is a new attitude when thinking about animals in the wild, one that focuses on increased compassion towards the very animals we’re trying to conserve. There is a growing movement in animal advocacy dedicated to the problem of “WAS”, short for “wild animal suffering”, which is often in tension with traditional conservation efforts.
Whereas environmentalists and conservationists are primarily concerned with abstract communities such as wildlife, species and ecosystems, those in the WAS space recognise the cruelty of mother nature, and view wild animals as individuals with their own interests — such as being free from suffering — and not merely as cogs in the biosphere machinery. Previously considered a reductio ad absurdum in debates about vegetarianism — “Should lions be stopped from eating gazelles too?” — animal advocates in the WAS movement have started to “bite the bullet” in such arguments and have begun to answer in the affirmative, that is, they accept the claim that wild animals should be kept safe from other wild animals.
This is in contrast to animal activists of bygone eras who were almost solely concerned with human-inflicted animal suffering. But the gazelle, of course, cares little whether its death comes at the gun of a hunter or the jaws of a lion. While the idea of intervening in wildlife conflicts would strike many of us as absurd — I dare you to bring it up at your next dinner party — it flows naturally from a simple premise: animals are worthy of moral consideration and their suffering matters. This view is also one that most of us already hold, if lightly. We implicitly endorse it whenever we feed birds in the park or desperately avoid hitting a squirrel with our cars.
Conventional wisdom has always been that the compassionate stance towards wild animals is to let them be free. But as the philosopher David Pearce — one of the most vocal voices in the WAS movement — points out in his online manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative, “non-human animals don’t need liberation; they need looking after”. This entails intervening in nature to reduce their suffering.
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So what do these interventions look like? Some of them, such as rescuing injured animals, are already familiar to us, as is the case whenever wildfires run rampant along the mountains of the Western Cape. But many of the interventions Pearce and his fellow travellers propose are a lot more ambitious. They include vaccinating wild animals to reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases and using immunocontraceptives and gene-editing technology, such as CRISPR, to control populations — interventions that should render cruel and misguided activities such as culling and the introduction of predators to “restore ecosystems” redundant.
More grandiose proposals involve removing predators from wild areas and eventually rewriting vertebrates’ genomes in an attempt to “veganise nature”. At this point, some readers may think that “wild animal suffering is natural”, “leave nature alone” or “we have no right to interfere in the lives of wild animals”. While it is prudent not to pursue any radical interventions before doing the necessary due diligence, claims that we should not intervene in nature as a matter of principle are morally misguided.
Think of a distant country where thousands of people die annually from starvation and easily preventable disease. Most of us find the idea that we should not do something about their suffering because their deaths are “natural” morally abhorrent. So too are we appalled by the suggestion that we should let them be “free” to resolve their own struggles. Not only do we have a right to act, but most of us would consider it an obligation. Given that the situation of wild animals in nature is arguably worse than any war-torn, poverty-stricken country is for humans, we should view intervening in wildlife as not merely justifiable but as morally urgent.
If we truly care about wild animals, then, it will be necessary to shift away from narrow concerns about conservation and shift towards compassion for those we’re trying to conserve. While intervening in wildlife will undoubtedly be a technically challenging task, the most immediate obstacle will be to earn public support. A deep reverence for nature is widespread, and any form of wildlife interventionism is likely to be met with fierce resistance. Well-intentioned as these objections may be, they serve to legitimise unspeakable cruelty. As Pearce notes: “The conservatism of the tender-minded is understandable; but profoundly reactionary. If triumphant, its living victims will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of a Mother Nature whose existence in rose-tinted guise has no place outside the romantic imaginations of its creators.”
• Ludwig Raal is a writer, reader and animal advocate. This essay is based on the thesis he completed at Stellenbosch University as part of his master’s degree in applied ethics in 2022. In 2019, he helped launch the Credence Institute, a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the interests of animals. He tweets at @ludwig_raal.
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