Is it wrong to kill wildlife and risk human survival? Of course it is.

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After I posted my piece about deer culling the other day, I received quite a few comments including this one from /r/Billiesjeans on Reddit … thank you. It prompted me to ask the question. Is it morally wrong to kill wildlife? Here is my response.

QUESTION: Is it a morally wrong to kill animals?

How do we define the right and wrong of killing wildlife?

The question of morality is fascinating. I am convinced now, more than ever, that in the majority of cases our decisions to kill wild animals are immoral, because they increase our chance of ecosystem collapse … making Earth less habitable for humans.

Surely there is no more widely-accepted definition of morality than something that harms ourselves?

We already accept that the consequence of our livelihoods impacts animals. This, and the fact that we don’t culturally consider ourselves an animal, means the traditional morality argument has been about animal rights, where ‘animal’ is defined as anything ‘not human’.

Now we know that our future is intimately connected to the existence of all animals, because we are one, the argument about morality becomes something different to what we’ve been used to.

Animals create the ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More that enable life support for humans, so anything we do to harm them, is just as much about their welfare as ours. We cannot separate the two. When we are talking about animal rights, we are inadvertently talking about human rights as well. Animal welfare and human welfare are equally intertwined.

How do we know killing wildlife won’t make things worse?

We kill animals by existing, whether we do something or do nothing. The difference is, that we can choose not to.

Most of the food we eat kills animals, whether it’s directly meat-based slaughter or indirectly, from growing crops and destroying habitat. When we do nothing animals also die, because while nature is allowed to take its course, our use of the environment imposes human-made pressures on their lives – all animals do this to each other, so we shouldn’t feel bad at expressing our animality.

But when we decide to deliberately intervene and cull this species here, or poison another there, we are often being extravagant. We risk picking at wounds, never quite enabling ecosystems to heal.

Before we do anything that would undermine the role of animals to support healthy functioning ecosystems, we need to ask the all-important question: “Will this result in a renewed dearth of animals and slow ecosystem recovery?”

Conservation scientists, land managers and politicians have been careless not to ask this question which means our actions have often made things worse. We are also unique among animals in building a vendetta against other wildlife … anything that is unusual, abundant or inconvenient to us, can become a focus for our hatred. This resentment clouds our better judgement, especially when maintaining animal populations is of over-riding benefit to us, in most cases. By losing respect for animals, we’ve lost respect for ourselves.

This is not just a whimsical issue, it has serious existential importance, because we are killing wildlife at a rate unprecedented in the history of the planet. Because we keep setting the clock back on ecosystem recovery the threat to our own survival has become very serious, as explained here:

What about pest species?

Even if animals appear inconvenient to us at the time e.g. regarded as ‘pests’, we must accept that they flourish only when ecosystems need to be brought back to something more habitable.

Mostly, we’re dealing with problems of our own making that are caused by decline in wildlife, and rather than addressing the root cause – which is lack of animals in the first place – we kill more animals. Often we address plagues by using the same pesticide technology that caused them in the first place. Each time, we make things worse, until eventually the bubble bursts.

I’ve covered this in two recent articles, one about mouse plagues and one about locust plagues. We are reaching a point where our agricultural systems are at absolute breaking point and we have only a matter of years left to change our policy and try something different.

Also read: You can’t beat mouse plagues with poison drone strikes!

I recently questioned whether culling deer was appropriate, not because I have a strong opinion, it was simply because I decided to ask myself the question: “Will this result in a renewed dearth of animals and slow ecosystem recovery?”

I’ve merely pointed out that they live in a completely altered environment and in some cases, there is already a lack of animal biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More to restore the ecosystems … I’m questioning whether the wisdom of killing animals outweighs the benefits of doing nothing. I don’t believe this is taken seriously-enough, so decisions to cull wildlife often has little basis in science. It’s driven more by a contempt for invasive species– that’s a misdirected emotion, considering we introduced them after destroying other native herbivore populations.

Also read: Pesticide use only makes Australia’s Plague Locust risk worse!

Deer aren’t a special case though, they are just an example … Australians also cull wild native kangaroos with similar consequences. Ironically, Australia is the only country in the world with extant megafaunaThe largest animals that represent the top of the trophic pyramid. These are the final building blocks in ecosystem structures for maximum entropy production. Megafauna can be measured at any spatial scale. The largest animal that ever lived on Earth is the Blue Whale. In a grassland, spiders could be considered megafauna The term is generally reserved for animals larger More more abundant than its human population, meaning it may have more recovery potential than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Is it moral to ignore the consequence of killing animals, if there is a good chance they are critical to rebuilding entire economies? Of course it is. I continually wonder why farmers and conservationists are forced into conflict when they are after the same outcomes.  

Are there times when it can be morally responsible to kill animals?

The case of island rats is an exception and I’ll explain why. An absence of rats increases the biomass of animals. There is over-riding significance of seabird colonies for climate and food security. Rat free islands can have fifty per cent greater biomass of fish (because reefs are fed by seabird guano) and the seabirds transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More, amplifyAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More and concentrate nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More, that influence continental weather patterns.

In short, people and animals all benefit from eradicating rats from ocean islands. It makes the system more resilient, not less. How? Because the diversity and abundance of animals rapidly increases in the absence of rats. Rats are killing huge numbers of animals and continually resetting recovery back to zero. But nature never fails to impress with its ability recover fast, once a threat to stability – the threat of killing too many animals – is removed.

Here’s a film we made with BirdLife International a few years ago with the people of the Cook Islands – noting that great care was taken to ensure the poisons would not impact other critical components of the islands’ wildlife (the bait is harmless to coconut crabs). This is a far-cry from what is currently being proposed for mouse plagues in Australia, which is going to kill everything.

It’s never ideal to kill animals but in the case of island rats, I’m sure you’d agree, the benefits outweigh the costs, because it’s practical, achievable and can be done at scale, with enormous benefits for biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More.

Is there a middle-ground?

It’s through the consumption of meat that most of us are connected to wildlife mortality directly and now you might start to see why animal welfare is such an important consideration, when it comes to stabilising ecosystems. It’s our disrespect for the role of wildlife in ecosystem function that undermines our judgement about conservation … and in doing so, jeopardises our own survival.

I am vegetarian and there are many vegans among us too. But there are also those who choose to eat less meat, because it’s healthier. These are personal choices and what’s really exciting me about that at the moment, is the extent to which social media has allowed people to form these movements through a collective consciousness. Diversification of diet is reducing meat and fish consumption, which is necessary for food security but also diversifies the farming economy, making it easier for more primary producers to make a living.

People who choose to eat meat, are eating less, but spending more on better-quality which means, the animals tend to be treated with more respect – people who respect animals tend to look after the landscape better. Overall, consumers are looking for more responsible and organic farming and this can only be good for rural economies and the environment. Meanwhile, companies that routinely kill wild animals for food, are increasingly jeopardising their own future.

Richard Flanagan has been writing about how the Tasmanian salmon industry is deliberately killing large numbers of fur-seals. An industry with global supply chains cannot hope to sustain itself long-term, with that approach. It’s not just about cruelty, it’s the recognition that animals have an important part to play in our survival, that should feature in people’s judgement about human behaviour.

That’s why I wrote the article about kangaroos and more recently, about Long-tailed Ducks and fisheries in the Baltic – these are both examples where conservationists have failed to lead by example or understand the real value of animals as ecosystem engineers, risk making matters worse, not better.

We are already a far-cry from the industry-led, one-size-fits-all process that has dominated farming for decades, where multinational agrochemical and genetic-engineering companies have created a global monoculture that is costing farmers more to maintain and destroying their economy and environment with it. Increasingly, consumers expect more responsibility and farmers are beginning to find new ways to make a living. Humans, like all animals, are highly adaptable and rebuild ecosystems fast, once threats to existence are removed.

How do we know what is right or wrong?

I believe in keeping things simple. Science tends to overcomplicate discussion of these matters when all we need to do, to fix economic collapse – whether fisheries or farming – is to give nature room to breathe and specifically, rebuild wildlife populations.

If that one objective were to rule everything we do from today onwards, within a decade or so, we could revolutionise our economies, have more than enough food and address many of the most important challenges of today, including climate change.

The first thing we need is to change our perspective on animals, from one which is antagonistic, to one which recognises the critical role they play in human survival. This comes down to engendering newfound respect for wildlife. Farmers ought to be appalled with any neighbour who uses poison or kills wildlife unnecessarily … because the flow-on effect of this action, damages the entire landscape and takes everyone’s livelihoods away.

Besides that, it’s pointless. Nature is immovable and the more we try to combat it; the more we apply our own force against this inexorable stone-wall, the less space we give ourselves to survive. Abundant animals are the only mechanism that holds back the tide of our own demise and we’re literally squeezing them out of existence.

We must accept this reality before we can create the change in human values necessary for the wide scale adoption of better and policy and practice to protect animals – remember we are an animal and we cannot survive without the same things they need to survive.

Our objective needs to be, to create the conditions that allows wildlife to flourish alongside humanity, rather than indiscriminately imposing our needs on nature and in doing so, undermining our very own existence.

On the question of morality, therefore, it is no longer about whether it is right or wrong to kill wildlife, it’s about whether it’s right or wrong to risk all our futures by killing animals.