Species justice and harm to animals - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 125

have survived for millennia by eating a wide range of protein sources
including animals?
One of the critiques of both conservation and animal rights
movements is that they can privilege 'the need to save wildlife over
the rights of people who live with it' (Duffy, 2010: 82). From the point
of view of endangered species, for example, there is a big difference
between subsistence use of nature and over-kill.
Subsistence poaching is commonly thought of as 'hunting
for the pot', where rural communities hunt small amounts of
wildlife for food; good examples of this are when fishermen
in Guatemala hunt manatee (sea cows/dugongs) or villagers
in Zambia hunt impala for food. Subsistence poaching is
used only to meet the food needs of local communities
and is usually a continuation of a historical practice of
using certain types of wildlife for food. It relies on the use
of low-technology traps and snares, so it tends to be quite
small-scale and has a minimal impact on wildlife populations
when compared with larger-scale commercial poaching.
(Duffy, 2010: 87)
Nonetheless, from both an animal rights and animal welfare perspective,
traditional practices such as these are subject to condemnation insofar
as the animal is used instrumentally (and, perhaps, cruelly).
Debates occur not only in terms of how we make choices between
humans and animals in certain situations, but which animals are valued
over others when it comes to other kinds of survival dilemmas. This
is reflected in part in the ways in which animal rights activists tend to
privilege images and support for some types of animals over others.
The 'poster animals' for wildlife campaigns, for example, are tigers,
elephants, rhinoceros and polar bears. Sometimes wolves are included
in this list, as is the Tasmanian devil in places such as Australia. Not all
wild animals are seen as 'good' as is often the case with perceptions of
sharks and grizzly bears, and consequently these may not be featured
in quite the same way as other animals. Abuse of some wild animals
is not necessarily visible and so this, too, must be taken into account.
The classic case of this is the hundreds of thousands of whales, dolphins
and porpoises that die worldwide each year through entanglement in
fishing nets.
Some of the leading issues in regards to wild animals include
hunting and trapping, poisoning, habitat degradation, feral animals and
endangered species. A big concern, from the point of view of human