The elephant in the room
At the Wild Animal Welfare Committee conference 2024, Peter Sandøe gave a presentation in which he criticized animal welfare science for largely evading discussions of 'naturally occurring' welfare problems faced by wild animals.
Together with his three colleagues he argued for a middle position between forms of environmental ethics where focus is primarily on protecting wildness, biodiversity and ecological processes and forms of animal ethics where focus is primarily on protecting the welfare (and lives) of animals. They argued that there’s nothing incoherent about thinking that both animal welfare and ecological processes/biodiversity are worth protecting in their own right. Of course, with this position prioritizing may be necessary.
The presentation is available online and you can watch it here: The elephant in the room - to what extent do we have an obligation to prevent or alleviate the suffering of wild animals? (video recording on YouTube).
The Wild Animal Welfare Committee conference was held on Thursday the 16th May 2024. The theme for the event was "Translating wildlife welfare into practice: wildlife management in the 21st century".
The aim of the conference was to:
- focus on developing more inclusive, integrative systems thinking, so that wildlife managers value and consider the welfare of individual wild animals as part of wider land stewarding
- shift the paradigm to ensure wildlife ethics, welfare and flourishing are at the centre of decision-making by organisations and others responsible for the ecosystem health of the land that they manage
- start to develop approaches to help engagement with those who hold differing views or are unaware of how individual animal welfare considerations can be incorporated into management practices
- explore routes to enhanced engagement with organisations with wildlife management responsibilities, to encourage more awareness of and concern for wildlife welfare (source: WAWC 2024)
All presentations are available online here: Wild Animal Welfare Committee (YouTube channel)